In an extended essay entitled Eureka: A Prose Poem, Poe attempted to resolve the paradox by arguing that the immense extent of the universe did not afford enough time for the light to arrive from distant stars.15 As he explained, “The only mode, therefore, in which . . . we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”
