The Sky at Night: Celestial Phenomena in Englsh Poetry, 1700-1917

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THE SKY AT NIGHT: POETIC COMMPLACES OF THE NIGHT SKY, is a book-length study of night sky poetry, 1700-1917. Although ubiquitous in the enlightenment period and in the romantic tradition, these poems have never been the subject of systematic study, even though there exists a extensive critical bibliography on landscape poetry more generally. The monograph has two parts. In the first part, 'The Cosmic Sublime: Measuring the Immeasurable,' I offer a comprehensive study of the range of night-sky poems in the age of Newton, when the fortunes of the discourse of the sublime and of the night-sky were significantly interwoven in English poetics. The second part of the study, 'The Poetic Commonplace of Urban Light: Urban Night-Sky Poetry in the Romantic Tradition,' looks closely at the romantic inheritance of the enlightement topics of the sublime night sky, exploring the widespread poetic commonplace of urban night light, and focussing on the repeated poetic theme of how the human creation of an urban sublime threatens the supremacy of the natural sublime. One of the central research hypotheses of this project, and the subject of part I, 'The Cosmic Sublime' is that there is a striking affinity between the astronomical mathematics of the Newtonian synthesis and the belle-lettristic discourse of the sublime, an affinity that suggests the sublime's role in the transformations of natural philosophy into the scientific disciplines of the nineteenth century. The discourse of the sublime took on the theological and then psychological work that had earlier been part of the domain of natural philosophers. In particular, early eighteenth century discussions of the celestial sublime offered a set of reflections on the astonishing implications of the calculus, the mathematics of both infinite and infinitesimal series that allowed for the extrapolations required by Newton's mathematic assertions that the laws of the heavens were the same laws that worked on earth.The landscape poetry of looking, in both its georgic and meditative modes, depended upon and reinforced the poet's ability to organise the vista into a coherent aesthetic whole, and worked upon the assumption that there was some reciprocity between human cognition and the visual scene. For the poet of the night sky, however, who looks up, not out, the task is to make a poetic shape out of something that cannot be encompassed: the infinitude of the universe itself. I argue that skypoems rework and accommodate and use the generic conventions of the pastoral-georgic tradition of the earth. In the course of the later eighteenth century, as Newtonianism raises new problems and terrors for the earth-bound poet, the poetry of the night sky shifts from a confident set of assertions about universal coherence to a more troubled, secular, and psychological representation of the experience of sublimity. The sky-scape becomes something strangely alienated from the mind: unreciprocal, natural yet inhuman, mineral, visually unintelligible. The second half of the monograph, 'The Poetic Commonplace of Urban Light' discusses the poetry of city lights in the romantic tradition: this part is concerned with the way in which heavenly light and humanly constructed urban light / stars and streetlight / compete for aesthetic superiority in 19century poetry in the romantic tradition.The study offers a rebuttal of the critical perspective that finds in urban poetry from Wordsworth through Eliot the representation of alienated modern life. It maps out instead a robust tradition that associates the illumination of the city from both sky and lamp with subjective freedom and objective knowledge.