How Could Poe Know all This?

The American poet Edgar Allan Poe in 1846 published Eureka, a long metaphysical opus. It is a startling essay fraught with startling precognitions. For instance, Sixty years before Einstein, Poe suggested that space and duration are one; that space and time fuse into a spacetime continuum. The poet also said that the stars and the universe itself undergo periodic deaths and rebirths. Furthermore, proposed Poe, we live in an expanding universe. The idea of an expanding universe is a fundamental concept of modern astrophysics. However, the theory that the cosmos is expanding was accepted by astrophysicists only a century after the publication of Eureka.