SOURCE: “End(ing)s and Mean(ing)s in Pym and Eureka,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 55-64.

In the following essay, Miecznikowski cites Poe's Eureka as an “apologia” for Pym, noting that the former work justifies the idea that some mysteries cannot be adequately explained.

Critics over the past twenty to thirty years have been attentive to the similarity in style and theme between the two longest works of Poe's career: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), which may be called a “novel”; and Eureka (1848), which is subtitled “A Prose Poem.”¹⁷ Until more recently, however, what Poe calls in Eureka the “propensity for the continuous—for the analogical” has perhaps led many interpreters of these texts “astray” (299-300). Content to adopt the view that Pym “prefigures” Eureka, readers have often shortsightedly viewed the novel through the poetical essay, thus taking for granted that...