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

This article examines the theme of global vision and the “view from nowhere” in Edward Young’s mid-eighteenth-century poem *Night Thoughts* and its influence on William Blake’s later work *The Four Zoas*. Young’s poem repeatedly employs the image of the terrestrial globe as a metaphor for a disorienting yet affectively charged cognitive shift, wherein the speaker attempts to transcend earthly perspective to gain an objective, cosmic understanding of existence, grief, and spirituality. This global vision functions as a hermeneutic device that parallels the poem’s fragmented structure and devotional trajectory, oscillating between moments of disorientation and fleeting clarity without offering definitive resolution. Blake’s engagement with Young’s global poetics—especially through his commissioned designs for *Night Thoughts* and his own poetic mythography—both inherits and critically reworks this “view from nowhere,” emphasizing the epistemological limits and emotional pathos of such abstract, totalizing perspectives. The article concludes by situating these global visions alongside contemporaneous literary tropes like the bubble, arguing that Young’s and Blake’s globe imagery complicates simplistic Enlightenment notions of objective knowledge by framing global vision as a speculative, provisional, and affectively charged space for poetic and philosophical inquiry.