Volume 43 of the Etudes Epistémè includes an article by Elsa Cazeneuve, "De l’œil à l’étoile : poétiques du globe chez William Blake, William Wordsworth et Samuel Taylor Coleridge’":
This paper proposes the idea that astronomy contributed to structure the perceptive philosophy and poetics of the first Romantic generation through the figure of the globe. Indeed, celestial spheres came to serve as a metaphor for the eye globe, which in turn symbolized the possibility of renewed or expanded vision. Astronomy fascinated the first generation of Romantic poets. Since he was a boy, Coleridge went star-gazing with his father. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth received a scientific education at Cambridge which included astronomy; they were also eager to learn about the new world views promulgated by contemporary astronomers such as William Herschel, who discovered planet Uranus in 1781. Blake, on the other hand, was fiercely opposed to a form of science which created the conditions of mental and perceptive imprisonment. To him, astronomers promoted a view of the cosmos that belittled mankind; Blake sought to reestablish the visual powers of man and replaced the celestial charts with a map of infinity. Whether they supported astronomy or criticized it, all three poets relied on astronomical language to redefine the creative powers of visual perception, which the telescope contributed to enlarge or to distort. In the writings of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the stars become symbols of a divine light to which they address their thoughts. Blake's engravings intertwine celestial and human bodies to create a new representation of mankind. This paper will therefore analyze the multiple ways in which the symbolical reversal of celestial and ocular globes testifies to the powers and limits of the Romantic eye.
Elsa Cazeneuve is a doctoral student at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris.
This paper is available from Etudes Epistémè. (Open Access, French.)