American Zodiac: Astronomical signs in Dickinson, Melville, and Poe (Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe)

Science and literature, two means of inquiry now thought in opposition (if not posed as outright contradiction) emerged for a moment in the nineteenth century as provocatively complimentary in their methods of reading. In America, astronomy in particular provided a rich, complex subject for writers of the imagination to think about in terms of content and methodology. The purpose of my study is to uncover these unacknowledged astronomical referents in the works of Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, and engage them as interpretive contexts in new readings of their most esoteric projects; specifically, Dickinson's solstice and circumference poetry, the Plinlimmon pamphlet in Melville's Pierre, and Poe's Eureka. After providing historical context through the shared public experience of the 1833 Leonid Meteor Storm, I uncover several astronomical and scientific sources for these writers: Denison Olmsted for Dickinson; Gauss and Plotinus for Melville; and Kepler and Alexander von Humboldt for Poe, among others. Exploring these sources in close readings of their works, I find that these authors employ astronomical facts in very different, metaphorical ways in response to the larger challenge of navigating their own poetics between the emerging new laws of science and the immeasurability of human feeling evoked by the unknown Universe.