"Where is Earth?": Reading Global Vision and the View from Nowhere in Edward Young's Night Thoughts and William Blake's The Four Zoas

In his nine-book poem Night Thoughts , Edward Young seeks out a "view from nowhere" from which to appraise the world as a whole and especially the terrestrial globe. I argue that Young does so as a means of both contemplating the parameters of human thought and recalibrating readerly attention. I pursue a series of close readings of instances of global vision in the poem, proposing that these moments involve a process of pause, disorientation, and attentional recalibration. Throughout, I theorize the relationship of these parts to the poem's whole, arguing that the spatiotemporal scalar shift afforded by the view from nowhere intensifies and condenses the nowhere (or no-when) of night-time and crucially punctuates and regulates the simultaneously tortuous and teleological framework of the poem. In a second section, I propose that Young's global poetics found renewed articulation in the work of William Blake, arguing that Blake found in Young's globes a crucial imaginative resource and some key coordinates for his own more overtly critical but still agonistic conception of the view from nowhere. This study thereby nuances a still-prevalent characterization of the globe as a consistently triumphalist, completist, and stable unit of knowledge production in eighteenth-century Britain.