wing our wants to impel our choices and actions in life, the arts and sciences were recurrent topics for Poe in his poetry. Many times it seemed as if art and science were characters playing the roles of opposite foes, and the same could be said for sanity and insanity. Poe reminds the reader that there is a fine line between sanity and insanity, love and hate, and even the dream world and the real world. It is as if Poe saw dreams as an entrance to the subconscious mind where the line between reality and the imaginary diverged and then blended in a violent, continuous cycle of blurred creativity that bordered on insanity. In “Sonnet-to Science” it would seem from his choice of words used to describe science that he thought of science as quite evil. Poe used words like "preyest," "Vulture," and "torn," to describe science's impact on mankind. Apparently, Poe did not view science or the advances made by science as a good thing, rather he felt that science "alterest all things with thy peering eyes.(2)" The eye for most poets has long been considered a window to the soul and as such Poe must have thought that science was becoming to God-like if it had such power to alter all things just by examining them closely. It would seem that he felt certain things about the human psyche or form needed to remain a secret from man. He most certainly felt that science was trespassing on matters of the heart in terms of the heart representing emotion and ones experiences in life as denoted in the line, “Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart(3)”. It was as if he thought that the realities as unearthed by science were destroying the heart of man by replacing emotion with an emphasis toward reasoning and intellect which might be construed by a poet as cold detachment. In “Silence--A Sonnet,” Poe seemed to be addressing the "corporate silence" as the symbolic nature of death almost as a personage separate from...
