The Rhythmic Universe, or Spatial Dynamics in Shelley’s Poetics

Abstract

Certainly, the hypothesis of a ‘temporalization of experience’ posited by Bender and Wellbery and discussed in relation to Byron’s The Giaour has been confirmed. The evidence suggests that chronotypology, at least as represented by the modulating registers of time in Byron’s poem, underwent a revolution across the divide of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the periodic range for English Romanticism. However, the relativistic principles embedded within this ‘new’ form for time demand that, necessarily, ‘new’ views of space would accompany any chronotypological paradigm shift. Romantic poetry would manifest ‘a spatiality of thought’, in Gaston Bachelard’s phrase, that would complement the ‘temporalization of experience’ (Bachelard Poetics 212),¹ for Romantic poetics, like contemporary physical theory, marries time and space (e.g. the relationship of Los and Enitharmon in Milton). As the century turned, the spatial dimension of Romantic poetics underwent a period of inflation that matched the extension of space offered in Kant’s postulation of a universe of galaxies and the more limited expansion of the solar system by Herschel’s discovery of a new planet, Uranus. As Ivors Leclerc notes, ‘By the nineteenth century, the phrase “a spatial extent” came to make sense … In fact, the adjective “spatial”, according to the OED, was of mid-nineteenth-century origin’ (209).

The dimensions of the universe correspond to the spiral of our understanding.

(Skolimowski 78)

The plurality of worlds — the indefinite immensity of the universe — is a most awful subject of contemplation.

(P. Shelley Trumpet 339)

From Moses to Einstein, the history of light is also the history of space.

(Zajonc 97)