Title: A Secret Revival: On the Platonic Tradition in Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka and His Aesthetic Thoughts

Abstract: As a representative of American romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe’s aesthetics has won him widespread praise as a genius, but what is barely known is that Poe’s aesthetics originated from the ancient Platonic tradition. Poe’s cosmological essay Eureka is the key to revealing the interconnection between him and the Platonic tradition. Since modern times, from Platonism there emerged two separated paths of rationalism and irrationalism. Poe’s aesthetic career is a process in which both paths coexist and the romantic surpasses the scientific. Eureka continues Poe’s early thinking and writing, develops the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, reveals the romantic spirit as the ancient aesthetic concept of the sacred and immortal soul, and marks the highness and completion of Poe’s aesthetics. Replacing speculative philosophy with literature is an expression of Poe’s genius, a “Poe-tic” Platonic path to the self that is based on and transcends reality.

Keywords:: Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, aesthetic thoughts, Platonic tradition

Author: Lilin Chen, Lecturer, School of Liberal Arts, Minnan Normal University, Zhangzhou, Fujian, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2024.03.002