Untitled (plate 13), from Fourteen Etchings

Fourteen Etchings was originally conceived to illustrate Edgar Allan Poe’s prose poem Eureka (1848), a lengthy and mostly intuitive exposition on the origin, essence, and destiny of the material and spiritual universe. Winters later altered his approach to focus on the dichotomous interplay between invented and natural forms, juxtaposing hand-drawn images of forms that imitate natural systems with luminous photogravures of X-ray images of human skulls, legs, arms, and hands. Though Winters abandoned a more literal interpretation of Poe’s poem, he nonetheless addressed some of the themes found there, such as the origin and meaning of the universe and man’s destiny after death. In their totality, Winters’s images evoke the mysteries of the natural world, tempered by the haunting reality of human mortality.