Scribbled in the Stars: Milton, Keats, Mallarmé

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay presents three case studies from a modern European poetic lineage, three poetic generations that attended to stars and constellations in the wake of modern cosmological systems within which the stars themselves seemed to turn away from the poets and towards the astronomers. The essay charts a sequence that reaches across literary periods as traditionally conceived, but in each instance the same specifically modern question about poetry’s place and meaning recurs. It is a question that the figure of the star—with its singular history as both a poetic and scientific object—both crystallizes and refracts: who is the poet and what is poetry in a universe of empirical knowledge? In what follows, we consider how a pre-Romantic poet, John Milton, a Romantic poet, John Keats, and finally a post-Romantic poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, each grappled with the new sciences’ displacement of poetry’s pretensions to speak for and with the stars, reordering the creative imagination’s relation to the heavens.