Cosmos. Eureka was Poe’s attempt to survey the universe – including all things ‘spiritual and material’ – echoing Humboldt’s approach of including the external and the internal world. The universe, Poe wrote, was ‘the most sublime of poems’. Equally inspired, Walt Whitman wrote his celebrated poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, with a copy of Cosmos on his desk. Whitman even composed a poem called ‘Kosmos’ and proclaimed himself ‘a kosmos’ in his famous poem ‘Song of Myself’.
