A newspaper covering the lecture stated this directly:
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While a fuller account of Poe’s lesser known political activities from his 1830 involvement in France’s aborted second revolution through his 20 year career was brilliantly showcased by the pioneering research of Allan Salisbury (1949-1992) and delivered in a 2019 lecture by this author, for today’s purposes, I would like to focus merely on Poe’s vision as outlined in his Stylus Prospectus and final essay known as Eureka.Įureka: A Prose Poem was intended by the author to be the governing philosophical manifesto that would guide the spirit of the Stylus and was based upon a series of February 1848 lectures delivered by Poe in New York entitled “The Cosmography of the Universe”. Poe’s intention to break the practice of anonymous authorship was especially important in the 1840s as magazines like the Southern Literary Messenger and Graham’s Magazine rarely published their authors’ names and this anonymity made it extremely easy to slander and lie without remorse, to the detriment of the minds and morals of the population and thereby the nation’s moral fitness to survive. It will eschew the stilted dullness of our own Quarterlies, and while it may, if necessary, be no less learned, will deem it wiser to be less anonymous, and difficult to be more dishonest, than they.” It will resist the dictation of Foreign Reviews. It will support the general interests of the Republic of Letters, and insist upon regarding the world at large as the sole proper audience for the author.
It will aim at affording a fair and not dishonorable field for the true intellect of the land, without reference to the mere prestige of celebrated names. It will enlist the loftiest talent, but employ it not always in the loftiest - at least not always in the most pompous or Puritanical way. In its mechanical appearance - in its typography, paper and binding - it will far surpass all American journals of its kind… It will discuss not only the Belles-Lettres, but, very thoroughly, the Fine Arts, with the Drama: and, more in brief, will give, each month, a Retrospect of our Political History.
“The Stylus will include about one hundred royal octavo pages, in single column, per month forming two thick volumes per year. Following the guiding model of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack and his beloved Friedrich Schiller’s journal Thalia, Poe’s new magazine was to provide a cultural mass education of the population using drama, poetry, science and the arts as well as act as a platform for great republican artists and thinkers to rally around during a time of profound crisis in America’s history, teetering as it was upon the precipice of dissolution which would explode within a matter of 12 years in the form of the Civil War.ĭescribing his new journal Poe stated in his prospectus: Poe’s creation of his own magazine would liberate him from the shackles of editorial constraints for the first time in his life. Having tirelessly collected $1500 in subscriptions from supporters in Virgina, Poe was finally about to embark upon a new phase of his life’s mission, which he had described as “the one great purpose of my literary life” adding “ undoubtedly (unless I die) I will accomplish it.” Nowhere was this made more clear than in the last (and least known) essay written mere months before the artist was to was be bizarrely struck by a mysterious “sickness” which led to his death a mere few days later under extremely suspect circumstances, en route from Virginia to New York where he had planned to set up a new type of magazine known as “The Stylus”. However, it is only when one escapes from the narrow characterization of Poe as a “master of the macabre” which has been pummelled into the mass psyche for over 170 years that we are able to begin to appreciate the universal character of Poe as a both a renaissance man and political revolutionary who engaged in the highest form of cultural warfare in defense of America’s greatest founding principles and in opposition to all systems of empire.
What I here propound is true: - therefore it cannot die: - or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will “rise again to the Life Everlasting. Nevertheless it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.”Įdgar Poe is known for many things, but an epistemological warrior is not usually one of them.