Poetic Responses to the Size of the Universe: Astronomical Imagery and Cosmological Constraints

Abstract

How have writers responded to the enormous size of the astronomical universe? This paper reviews a number of poetic meditations on the nature of human life spurred by revelations from astronomy, specifically relating to the increasing size of the physical universe and how this impacts upon humanity's psychological and spiritual being. Beginning with the conversations on the cosmic ‘annihilation’ of the human between Swithin St Cleve and Lady Constantine in Thomas Hardy's novel ‘Two on a Tower’ (1882), the first group of texts examined reveal the orientation of the ‘alien within’, a cosmological agoraphobia. The interior and exterior of this attitude is examined, that is, how much of it was really prompted by the inhumanly large size of the cosmos and how much of it was there already, an alienation opportunistically projected onto the astronomy of the time. Both humanistic and religious reactions against this posture are discussed. The second group of poetic responses to the size of the universe comes from a younger generation of poets, writers who have grown up acquainted with the basics of modern astronomy. This group includes Diane Ackerman (‘Lady Faustus’), Emily Grosholz (‘Poems overheard at a Conference on Relativity Theory’), Michael Collier (‘The Heavy Light of Shifting Stars’), and Pattiann Rogers (‘Achieving Perspective’). These writers employ concrete sensual imagery on a more human scale to establish a poetic connection between the observer and distant astronomical bodies, reintegrating our human presence in an increasingly vast universe.