¹ See Wilbur's “Introduction” to the Dell Laurel edition of Poe's poems (New York, 1959), p. 12. Wilbur writes: “Since the poet's business is to help undo phenomena toward unity, dreaming the oak of creation back to its original acorn, his negation of human and earthly subject-matter becomes in Poe's cosmic theory positive; his destructiveness becomes creative.” In Eureka, Poe immediately states his basic proposition: “—In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of A11 Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation” (The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, New York, 1902, xvi, 185–186; all references to Poe's works are to this edition).

² The subtitle of Adams' book (New York, 1966) is “Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century”; Petersen's article appeared in Poe Newsletter, i (1968), 14–16. I am indebted to Petersen for suggestions regarding the subject of Nothing. Petersen, however, finds Poe less “skeptical” than I. He writes in “Poe and the Void,” for example, that “disappointment is the source of the void in man's experience. Disappointment is the cancelling, the subtracting of hopeful expectation. A series of jolting subtractions of this sort can produce in some temperaments not mere skepticism but a thoroughgoing disbelief in his hopes and the habit of believing only in his fears” (p. 15; my italics). That Poe's appalled apprehension of the possibility of Void was tempered by an ambivalent and ironic turn of mind (always watchful for some hopeful clue but always suspicious of it) is, of course, my thesis here.