In the nineteenth century London became the greatest city in the world; it also became largely invisible - at least for poets. The 'Minute Particulars' that for Blake enabled vision had been buried under a grimy blizzard of soot, smoke, and damp known as 'a London particular', a dense fog whose persistence grew along with the city's population and pollution. While the sun never set on the British empire, it sometimes never rose on its capital - for a week at a time, as Ruskin noted in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884). Like Blake and many of his contemporaries, Ruskin placed a premium on vision: ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, – all in one’, he memorably asserted in Modern Painters (1843). But what to do when circumstances – both cultural and climatic – hinder your taking a good look at your subject? This essay suggests that Romantics and Victorians struggled to represent the city for two interconnected reasons: a figurative, ‘mind-forg’d’ aversion and a literally obscured perspective. For not only was the city in its obstreperous plenitude and ceaseless mobility resistant to efforts to view it poetically, it was also quite simply hard to see, thanks to fog, smoke, and darkness.