"A Somewhat Remarkable Letter": Chambers, Poe, Whitman, Thoreau, and the Invention of the Prose Poem in Antebellum America.

This essay explores the far-reaching influence on antebellum American literature of the January 1845 publication of Robert Chambers's anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation , the first fully articulated exposition of evolutionary theory to appear in English. In Explanations , published in New York in 1846, Chambers replied forcefully to his scientific and theological critics and then correctly claimed that his work represented nothing less than a complete conceptual revolution, not only in science but in our understanding of the nature and purpose of existence itself. Focusing on Poe, Whitman, and Thoreau, this essay argues that Vestiges provided not only essential subject matter for these writers, but also provoked each to develop a productive set of heuristics, or open-ended methods of problem-solving. The revolutionary moment sparked by Vestiges led each to engage in a rethinking of the nature and purpose of literature and to develop stylistic innovations that came to change the direction of American literature itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]