The writers in this study envisage themselves in an expanding world of others. This is a world that requires turning towards and away, pushing beyond, decentering, delimiting, and traversing boundaries. A poetics of orientation traces this expansion through the construction of the Romantic lyric subject and its global coordinates of race, place, and culture. Returning to Omar F. Miranda, he considers the concept of the “global lyric” in the Romantic era, noting Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” and Sir William Jones's “Hymn to Surya” as variations of the global lyric form. Miranda finds Wheatley's “On Being Brought from Africa to America” as an important precursor to variations of the global lyric, a form which has “multidirectional pathways and diverse cultural and temporal orientations” (323, 310). Multidirectional, diverse, world-facing—Wheatley's orientations embrace ambiguity, paradox, experimentation, and unfixity. These orientations imagine a world that affirms a Black woman's subjectivity, a world that turns away from the “scornful eye” of the white gaze (6).

This chapter turns to William Blake's genre-crossing works that visualize queer forms and offer new frameworks for the world and its hemispheric divisions. As Katie Trumpener notes, Romantic writers, in situating themselves in a globalized idea of Britain, create “mental cartographies” of “conceptual, emotional, and perceptual frameworks of place and world making” (223). William Blake's mental and psychological realms of place and world-making are fundamentally different from the other authors in this book. His idea of East/West relations is not the hegemonic Orientalism of clear division and conquest. James Watt describes Blake's Orientalism as “plebeian” (146), and this sense of common people turns away from centering the poet as aesthetic center. Blake's Orient is concerned with freedom and creation unbarred from cultural norms. He departs from the scholarly Orientalism of Sir William Jones, the universalizing idealism of Percy Bysshe Shelley's shapes, the cosmopolitan raconteur of Byron's tales, and Hemans's poetics of affection.