My research considers how the development of mathematical philosophy might be expressed in Romantic poetry. By close reading poets such as Shelley, Wordsworth, and Blake, I consider the status of number before and during the 19th-century, the role of geometry in reasoning, and the generative tension of zero as both the empty set and the building block for the natural counting numbers. I read the image of sand (from individual grains to sprawling desert vistas) within Romantic poetry as the unifying material expression of these abstract concepts.