“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” This quote from the poem The Raven illustrates the profound and dramatic lyricism of one of the most influential authors in world literature: Edgar Allan Poe. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Writer, poet, and literary critic, Poe was the epitome of the artist tormented by his own demons. He was the master of terror and invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His dark landscapes, gothic mansions, and ancestral families steeped in madness function as powerful metaphors for the inevitable decay of everything around us. This is something he expresses in the introduction to his prose poem “Eureka”, where he articulates his ideas about the origin of the cosmos: “—In the Original Unity of the First Thing resides the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.” This universal sequence of birth and death is the ultimate memento mori: a reminder that extinction is the final destiny of all species, and even the Universe.

One of his most successful publications, and certainly the most unusual, was “The Conchologist’s First Book“ (a more affordable and popular edition of Thomas Wyatt’s “Manual of Conchology“, published by Harper and Brothers, who used Poe’s name to avoid copyright issues). Although Poe only wrote the preface and introduction, he incorporated a new classification system based on the work of the renowned paleontologist and naturalist Georges Cuvier.

Poe was fluent in French and translated Cuvier’s scientific classification. Furthermore, he learned the scientific method and incorporated it into the creation of his famous detective, Auguste Dupin. His sharp and meticulous mind was the literary model for Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (1769-1832) is considered the founding father of paleontology and comparative anatomy. At the beginning of the 19th century, Cuvier published “Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe” (1812) where he introduced a revolutionary theory: catastrophism, which postulated that the history of life on Earth was marked by extinction events.

In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dupin uses a description by Cuvier of an orangutan, detailing the animal’s strength, ferocity, and ability to mimic other behaviors, to solve the murders of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Camille. Dupin’s analytical method echoes Cuvier’s theory, according to which all parts of a being are correlated. Later, in his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe himself draws a striking parallel between the scientific method and the writing process, using his most famous poem, “The Raven,” to illustrate his writing principles.

References:

Poe, Edgar Allan, ed. The First Conchologist’s Book; or, A System of Testaceous Malacology. Based on Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology. 1839.

Poe, E. A. (1841). The Murders in the Rue Morgue. https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/the_murders_in_the_rue_morgue.pdf

Baldellou, M. M. (2013). FORETELLING DARWINISM, REVISING RACE: POE’S SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE IN “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE”. REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 66, 127-135.