How Could Poe Know all This? Poem by Paul Hartal

The American poet Edgar Allan Poe
in 1846 published Eureka,
a long metaphysical opus.
It is a startling essay fraught with
startling precognitions.

For instance,
Sixty years before Einstein, Poe suggested
that space and duration are one;
that space and time fuse
into a spacetime continuum.

The poet also said that the stars
and the universe itself undergo
periodic deaths and rebirths.

Furthermore, proposed Poe,
we live in an expanding universe.
The idea of an expanding universe
is a fundamental concept
of modern astrophysics.

However, the theory that the cosmos
is expanding was accepted
by astrophysicists only a century
after the publication of Eureka.