ABSTRACT
The revolution that was meant was, for the most part still only the occasional celestial metaphor for a change in fortune or a circular return to "the original." The earliest literal association of the ideas of Utopia and Revolution that the authors have been able to locate occurs in some mid-seventeenth-century verses of a poet named Robert Heath. He begins with a few lines of doggerel about Nicolaus Copernicus's opinions, but he is clearly concerned less with the "Earth's Globe" and "Spherick motion" than with the social and political implications of the new "Delirium." In situations of powerlessness, the militant political imagination is often generously permissive; it becomes large and embraces playful contradictions. The astral feeling of political mysticism, which linked local political events with universal signs, only deepened in the next half-century, especially after the onset of the English Civil War.
