Poetry's sense of place is often in tension with claims for its universality. Someone as deeply concerned with geographical particulars as William Wordsworth also insists that poetry's ‘object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative’. In contemporary debates, the abstract relationship between universals and particulars takes on new material dimensions in the relationship between local and global politics, economics, and culture. One curious consequence of this legacy is a latent continuity between the idealism of Romantic era poets or philosophers and utopian claims for global connectedness in recent decades. In his foundational survey, The Rise of the Network Society (first published in 1996), Manuel Castells describes the impact of then- emergent technologies:

Frances Cairncross's The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (1997) also finds wireless technologies ‘killing location, putting the world in our pockets’.Beyond the technological emphasis, Thomas Friedman's bestselling The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty- First Century (2005) argues that ‘the global competitive playing field was being levelled’ through a process ‘connecting all the knowledge centers of the planet together into a single global network’. Behind this proliferation of millennial forecasts lingers the media theorist Marshall McLuhan's famous declaration, in 1962, that ‘since the telegraph and radio, the globe has contracted, spatially, into a single large village’.

Whatever specific developments are responsible for these supposedly fundamental shifts, the dream (or nightmare) of a global network made up of ‘disembodied’ or ‘killed’ localities cannot be disentangled from a history of universalist ambitions in Western philosophy – ambitions which have often been articulated in relation to poetry. In its most direct expression, Aristotle's sense of poetry's distinctive concern with the ‘universal’ is expanded by Percy Bysshe Shelley’ insistence in The Defence of Poetry (1840), for example, by which ‘a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not’.