SOURCE: "'Paradise Unlost': Edward Young among the Stars," in Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia, edited by Dominic Baker-Smith and C. C. Barfoot, Rodopi, 1987, pp. 139-71.

In the following essay Barfoot examines Utopian themes and images in Young's Night Thoughts.

Moreover, so boundless are the bold excursions of the human mind, that in the vast void beyond real existence, it can call forth shadowy beings, and unknown worlds, as numerous, as bright, and, perhaps, as lasting, as the stars; such quite-original beauties we may call Paradisaical,

Natos sine semine flores.      OVID.¹

Can one legitimately smuggle Edward Young into a conference (or a book) on Utopia? Well, in one of the more easily available nineteenth-century editions of Young's Night Thoughts (by 1853 the inclusion of the author's name in the abbreviated title seems to have been already traditional), we find the editor, the Rev. George Gilfillan, a...