The Literary Compass: An Outlook on the Poetic Functions of Hydrography

For centuries, perhaps since the emergence of poetry itself, Western culture has engaged in the project of "writing the sea," or hydrography, and within this project the compass has played a fundamental role. The essay serves as a brief introduction into the cultural history of the compass and shows how, ever since its first use, the compass has guided specific techniques of writing and notation and has been both poetically and epistemically productive. It argues this claim through a historical argument reaching from Dante's reception of the Odyssey and Ripa's Iconologia to Bacon, who considered the compass one of his age's emblems, and even the technological thinking of Heisenberg and Heidegger.