Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Zsolt K. Virágos: The American Brand of the Myth of Apocalypse

in all things. Thus, in spite of the "sulpherousness" and the equally terrifying cold logic of God's justified wrath in much of New England Puritan writing, the characteristic vision was millennial in the sense that the Biblical myth comprehends both cataclysm and millennium: the regenerate would ultimately reign with Christ eternally: For there the saints are perfect saints, and holy ones indeed, From all the sin that dwelt within their mortal bodies freed: Made kings and priests to God through Christ's dear love's transcendency, There to remain, and there to reign with Him eternally. Evangelically motivated abolitionist writing before and during the Civil War deployed frightening apocalyptic symbology to serve as warning. Otherwise, in the age of both the first person singular and empire building, when optimistic visions of an ecstatic future represented the dominant tenor of the times, Poe, whom Douglas Robinson considers as the "central American apocalyptist" (281), was certainly an exception. Predictably, and for various well-known reasons, the budding culture's first homo aestheticus was reluctant to embrace millennial optimism and the celebration of a brave new world. His preoccupation with cosmological catastrophes and the cataclysmic end of the world peaked in the prose poem "Eureka," where interest in the annihilation of the world as a scientific reality is conspicuous.

8 Two of the prominent 19th-century nay-sayers, Hawthorne and Melville, both questioned the likelihood of a glorious consummation. Still, although Hawthorne's Puritan sense of the moral burden of 8 Poe's preoccupation with the cataclysmic option is also apparent in "A1 Aaraaf," "The Masque of the Red Death," the metaphysical prose dialogues "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion," 'The Colloquy of Monos and Una," and "The Power of Words." 133