| Sumario: | 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, particularly *The Four Zoas*. Young’s poem frequently employs the image of the terrestrial globe as a metaphor for a disorienting yet profound cognitive and spiritual perspective that oscillates between personal grief and universal contemplation, reflecting on mortality, morality, and divine understanding. The “view from nowhere,” a concept later theorized by philosopher Thomas Nagel, functions in Young’s work as a hermeneutic device that both unsettles and refocuses readerly attention, embodying the tension between subjective experience and the aspiration toward objective, cosmic comprehension. Blake’s engagement with Young’s global poetics—especially through his commissioned designs for *Night Thoughts* and his own poetic projects—both inherits and critically reconfigures this motif, emphasizing the limitations and pathos of abstract rationality while exploring imaginative and affective dimensions of global vision. The article concludes by situating these eighteenth-century poetic globes alongside the contemporaneous trope of the bubble, arguing that Young’s and Blake’s globe imagery complicates simplistic readings of Enlightenment worldviews by foregrounding the provisional, speculative, and affective nature of attempts to grasp totality in poetry and thought.
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