In September 1798, someday after their poem assortment Lyrical Ballads was revealed, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg within the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the last few months getting ready for what he referred to as ‘my German expedition’. The realisation of the scheme, he defined to a pal, was of the best significance to ‘my mental utility; and naturally to my ethical happiness’. He wished to grasp the German language and meet the thinkers and writers who lived in Jena, a small college city, southwest of Berlin. On Thomas Poole’s recommendation, his motto had been: ‘Communicate nothing however German. Dwell with Germans. Learn in German. Assume in German.’
After a couple of days in Hamburg, Coleridge realised he didn’t find the money for to journey the 300 miles south to Jena and Weimar, and as a substitute he spent virtually 5 months in close by Ratzeburg, then studied for a number of months in Göttingen. He quickly spoke German. Although he deemed his pronunciation ‘hideous’, his information of the language was so good that he would later translate Friedrich Schiller’s drama Wallenstein (1800) and Goethe’s Faust (1808). These 10 months in Germany marked a turning level in Coleridge’s life. He had left England as a poet however returned with the thoughts of a thinker – and a trunk stuffed with philosophical books. ‘No man was ever but an ideal poet,’ Coleridge later wrote, ‘with out being on the similar time a profound thinker.’ Although Coleridge by no means made it to Jena, the concepts that got here out of this small city have been vitally vital for his considering – from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of the self to Friedrich Schelling’s concepts on the unity of thoughts and nature. ‘There isn’t a doubt,’ one in every of his pals later mentioned, ‘that Coleridge’s thoughts is way more German than English.’
Few within the English-speaking world could have heard of this little German city, however what occurred in Jena within the final decade of the 18th century has formed us. The Jena group’s emphasis on particular person expertise, their description of nature as a dwelling organism, their insistence that artwork was the unifying bond between thoughts and the exterior world, and their idea of the unity of humankind and nature grew to become in style themes within the works of artists, writers, poets and musicians throughout Europe and the USA. They have been the primary to proclaim these concepts, which rippled out into the broader world, influencing not solely the English Romantics but additionally American writers similar to Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Many discovered German to know the works of the younger Romantics in Jena within the authentic; others studied translations or learn books about them. They have been all fascinated by what Emerson referred to as ‘this unusual genial poetic complete philosophy’. Within the many years that adopted, the Jena Set’s works have been learn in Italy, Russia, France, Spain, Denmark and Poland. Everyone was affected by ‘Germanomania’, as Adam Mickiewicz, one in every of Poland’s main poets, mentioned. ‘If we can’t be authentic,’ Maurycy Mochnacki, one of many founders of Polish Romanticism, wrote, ‘we higher imitate the good Romantic poetry of the Germans and decisively reject French fashions.’
This was not a trendy craze, however a profound shift in considering, away from Isaac Newton’s mechanistic mannequin of nature. Regardless of what many individuals may assume at the moment, the younger Romantics didn’t flip in opposition to the sciences or cause, however lamented what Coleridge described because the absence of ‘connective powers of the understanding’. The give attention to rational thought and empiricism within the Enlightenment, the chums in Jena believed, had robbed nature of awe and surprise. For the reason that late seventeenth century, scientists had tried to erase something subjective, irrational and emotional from their disciplines and strategies. The whole lot needed to be measurable, repeatable and classifiable. Lots of those that have been impressed by the concepts popping out of Jena felt that they lived in a world dominated by division and fragmentation – they bemoaned the lack of unity. The issue, they believed, lay with Cartesian philosophers who had divided the world into thoughts and matter, or the Linnaeun considering that had turned the understanding of nature right into a slim apply of accumulating and classification. Coleridge referred to as these philosophers the ‘Little-ists’. This ‘philosophy of mechanism’, he wrote to Wordsworth, ‘strikes Demise’. Thinkers, poets and writers within the US and throughout Europe have been enthralled by the concepts that developed in Jena, which fought the growing materialism and mechanical clanking of the world.
So, what was happening in Jena? And why was Coleridge so eager to go to this small city within the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar that had turn into a ‘Kingdom of Philosophy’? Jena seemed unassuming and, with round 4,500 inhabitants, it was decidedly small. It was compact and sq. inside its crumbling medieval city partitions, and it took lower than 10 minutes on foot to cross. At its centre was an open market sq., and its cobbled streets have been lined with homes of various heights and kinds. There was a college, a library with 50,000 books, e-book binders, printers, a botanical backyard and loads of outlets. College students rushed by the streets to their lectures or mentioned the most recent philosophical concepts within the city’s many taverns. Tucked into a large valley and surrounded by mild hills and fields, Jena was lovingly referred to as ‘little Switzerland’ by the Swiss college students.
Again within the 18th century, Jena and its college had been a part of the Citizens of Saxony however, due to difficult inheritance guidelines, the state had been divided up and the college was nominally managed by no fewer than 4 totally different Saxon dukes. In apply, it meant that nobody was actually in cost, permitting professors to show and discover revolutionary concepts. ‘Right here we’ve full freedom to assume, to show and to write down,’ one professor mentioned. Censorship was much less strict in contrast with elsewhere, and the scope of topics that may very well be taught was broad. ‘The professors in Jena are virtually totally impartial,’ Jena’s most well-known inhabitant, the playwright Friedrich Schiller, defined. Thinkers, writers and poets in hassle with the authorities of their house states got here to Jena, drawn by the openness and relative freedoms. Schiller himself had arrived after he had been arrested for his revolutionary play The Robbers (1781) in his house state, the Duchy of Württemberg.
On a fortunate day on the finish of the 18th century, you might need seen extra well-known writers, poets and philosophers in Jena’s streets than in a bigger metropolis in a complete century. There was the tall, gaunt-looking Schiller (who might solely write with a drawer stuffed with rotten apples in his desk), the cussed thinker Fichte, who put the self on the centre of his work, and the younger scientist Alexander von Humboldt – the primary to foretell dangerous human-induced local weather change. The sensible Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm, each of them writers and critics with pens as sharp because the French guillotines, lived in Jena, as did the younger thinker Friedrich Schelling, who redefined the connection between the person and nature, and G W F Hegel, who would turn into one of the crucial influential philosophers within the Western world.
In an age of absolutism, the Jena Set have been united by an obsession with the free self
Additionally in Jena was the formidable and free-spirited Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. She carried the names of her father and three husbands, however she was fiercely impartial and had no intention of dwelling in accordance with social conventions. The younger poet Novalis, who had studied in Jena, usually visited his pals there from his household property in close by Weißenfels. Within the winter months, you might need glimpsed Germany’s most celebrated poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as he skated on the river – his bulging stomach buttoned along with a flowery waistcoat. Older and extra well-known, Goethe grew to become one thing like a benevolent godfather to the youthful era. He was impressed, even rejuvenated, by their new and radical concepts, they usually, in flip, worshipped him.
These nice thinkers attracted college students from throughout Germany and Europe to Jena. Starstruck to see so many well-known poets and philosophers sitting in a single row on the concert events within the Zur Rose tavern, they couldn’t consider their eyes when seemingly all of Germany’s best minds squeezed into one room at a celebration.
Every of those nice intellects lived a life value telling, however the truth that all of them got here collectively on the similar time in the identical place is much more extraordinary. That’s why I’ve referred to as them the ‘Jena Set’ in my book Magnificent Rebels (2022).
In an age when most of Europe was nonetheless held within the iron fist of absolutism, the Jena Set have been united by an obsession with the free self. ‘An individual,’ Fichte shouted from the lectern throughout his first lecture in Jena in 1794, ‘must be self-determined, by no means letting himself be outlined by something exterior.’ Fichte’s philosophy promised freedom at a time when German rulers presided over the smallest particulars of their topics’ lives with an authoritarian delight – refusing marriage proposals, arbitrarily elevating taxes, or promoting their topics as mercenaries to different nations. They have been the legislation, police and choose rolled into one. For hundreds of years, philosophers and thinkers had argued that the world was managed by a divine hand – however now, Fichte mentioned, there have been no absolute or God-given truths, definitely not safeguarded to princes and kings. The one certainty, the fiery thinker defined, was that the world was skilled by the self. The self (or the Ich, in German), ‘initially and unconditionally posits its personal being’ – it mainly brings itself into existence. And thru this highly effective preliminary act, it additionally conjures up Fichte’s so-called non-Ich (the exterior world). In line with Fichte, the fact of the exterior world was merely transferred from the Ich to the non-Ich. This didn’t imply that the Ich creates the exterior world, however that it creates our information of the world. By making the self the primary precept of every little thing, Fichte recentred the best way we perceive the world. Not solely was the self the ‘supply of all actuality’, but it surely was imbued with probably the most thrilling of all powers: free will and self-determination.
Fichte’s Ich-philosophy was lit by the fireplace of the French Revolution. When the French revolutionaries denounced aristocratic privilege and declared all males equal, they promised a brand new social order, grounded in freedom. ‘My system is, from starting to finish, an evaluation of the idea of freedom,’ Fichte declared: ‘Simply because the French nation is tearing man free from his exterior chains, so my system tears him free from the chains of things-in-themselves, the chains of exterior influences.’
There have been passionate amorous affairs, scandals, and fights with the authorities
These concepts have been so radical and influential that these few years in Jena grew to become crucial decade for the shaping of the trendy thoughts and our relationship to nature. The story of the Jena Set is one in every of radical concepts – concepts concerning the start of the trendy self and the significance of Romanticism – but it surely additionally performs out like a cleaning soap opera because the younger women and men broke conventions and used their very own lives as a laboratory for his or her revolutionary philosophy. They positioned a free and emboldened self not solely on the nexus of their work but additionally on the centre of their lives. Their lives grew to become a stage on which to expertise the Ich-philosophy.
There have been passionate amorous affairs, scandals, and fights with the authorities. Caroline Schlegel, for instance, widowed at 24, frolicked with German revolutionaries and was imprisoned by the Prussians for being a sympathiser of the French Revolution. In jail, she found that she was pregnant after a one-night stand with a younger French soldier. After her imprisonment, she was handled like an outcast, however the younger author August Wilhelm Schlegel got here to her rescue: he married her, gave her a brand new identify and, with that, a brand new starting. The Schlegels had an open marriage, which Caroline defined was ‘an alliance that between ourselves we by no means thought to be something however completely free’. Each of them had lovers. When Caroline fell in love with Friedrich Schelling, 12 years youthful than she, Schlegel didn’t thoughts. In actual fact, he joked: she ‘isn’t completed but … her subsequent lover remains to be sporting a bit sailor swimsuit!’
The Schlegels weren’t the one ones who had come to such an uncommon association. The Humboldts additionally had an open marriage and Caroline von Humboldt’s lover moved in with the couple; Goethe lived together with his mistress; in the meantime, Friedrich Schlegel outraged the literary institution and well mannered society by taking readers into his bed room to look at him and Dorothea Veit make love. Schlegel had supposed to shock, and succeeded. ‘I would like there to be an actual revolution in my writing,’ he instructed Caroline.
The group met virtually each day. ‘Our little academy,’ as Goethe referred to as it within the spring of 1797, was very busy. They composed poems, translated nice literary works, performed scientific experiments, wrote performs, and mentioned philosophical concepts. They went to lectures, concert events and dinner events. They have been fascinated about every little thing – artwork, science and literature. They have been thrilled by this communal method of working. Because the poet Novalis defined: ‘I produce finest in dialogue.’ They referred to as this manner of working ‘symphilosophising’, a brand new time period they’d invented. They added the prefix ‘sym-’ to phrases similar to philosophy, poetry and physics – it primarily meant ‘collectively’. ‘Symphilosophy is our connection’s true identify,’ Friedrich Schlegel mentioned, as a result of they believed that two minds might belong collectively.
They typically met in Caroline’s sunlit parlour on the bottom flooring of the Schlegel home close to the market sq.. Caroline had no real interest in enjoying the home spouse. She merely served some gherkins, potatoes, herrings and a tasteless soup. Nobody complained. The flavour, one customer mentioned, was not offered by the components of the meal however by the mental menu that Caroline ready.
Caroline Schlegel steered discussions, demanded opinions and her sharp analytical thoughts formed the chums’ considering. She woke up Friedrich Schlegel’s curiosity in historical Greek poetry, for instance, enhancing his essays, suggesting books and instructing him about robust feminine figures in historical mythologies. ‘I felt the prevalence of her thoughts over mine,’ he admitted, including ‘she made me a greater individual.’ Caroline’s opinions about poetry, Friedrich Schlegel instructed his brother August Wilhelm, have been illuminating, and her passionate help for the French Revolution was infectious.
For the Jena Set, Shakespeare was the epitome of the ‘pure genius’, the quintessential romantic author
Caroline additionally wrote many evaluations below her husband’s identify, and August Wilhelm Schlegel counted on her literary contributions. Collectively, they produced the primary main German verse translation of Shakespeare, translating 16 performs in six years. It was an in depth collaboration, with August Wilhelm translating and Caroline scanning the verses in a sort of chant. Their Shakespeare is, to this present day, the usual version in Germany, however her identify remains to be lacking from the quilt.
August Wilhelm Schlegel’s revealed lectures on Shakespeare additionally resurrected the playwright in England. Within the 18th century, Shakespeare had turn into unpopular with critics who described his language as disordered, ungrammatical and vulgar. Voltaire, for instance, had declared Hamlet ‘the work of a drunken savage’. For the Jena Set, although, William Shakespeare was the epitome of the ‘pure genius’, the quintessential romantic author. In distinction to the polished refinement of the French dramatists Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille, who had adopted inflexible guidelines, Shakespeare’s performs have been emotional and his language unruly and natural – ‘the spirit of romantic poetry dramatically pronounced’. English poets and writers, similar to Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle, all learn and admired August Wilhelm’s Lectures on Dramatic Artwork and Literature (1809-11). Wordsworth, mentioned Coleridge, had declared that ‘a German critic first taught us to assume appropriately regarding Shakespeare.’
On the finish of 1797, Friedrich Schlegel satisfied his brother August Wilhelm, his sister-in-law Caroline Schlegel and his pal Novalis that they need to publish their very own literary journal. It will be of ‘chic impertinence’, he introduced, and they’d combat the literary institution. They referred to as it the Athenaeum, a title that stood for studying, democracy and freedom. Caroline was its editor. Printed on low cost paper with none illustrations, the Athenaeum might need appeared unassuming, however its content material was the Jena Set’s manifesto to the world. It was within the pages of the Athenaeum that they first used the time period ‘romantic’ in its new literary which means, launching Romanticism as a global motion. They offered its identify and objective but additionally its mental framework – it was ‘our first symphony’, as August Wilhelm mentioned.
Today, the time period ‘Romanticism’ evokes pictures of lonely figures in moonlit forests or on craggy cliffs – as expressed in Caspar David Friedrich’s work – in addition to artists, poets and musicians who emphasised emotion and longed to be at one with nature. Some say the Romantics opposed cause; others merely consider candlelit dinners and passionate declarations of affection. For the Jena Set, although, Romanticism was one thing way more complicated and radical. Romantic poetry, they mentioned, was unruly and dynamic – a ‘dwelling organism’. They wished to romanticise your entire world. They strived to unite humankind and nature, artwork and science. If two components might create a brand new chemical compound, so Romantic poetry might convey collectively totally different disciplines and topics, and weld them into one thing new. ‘By giving the commonplace the next which means,’ Novalis mentioned, ‘by making the abnormal look mysterious, by granting to what’s identified the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise.’ And for that, the chums insisted, one wants creativeness.
They elevated creativeness as the best school of the thoughts. They didn’t flip in opposition to cause, however believed it inadequate to know the world. For hundreds of years, philosophers had mistrusted creativeness, believing it obscured the reality. The British author Samuel Johnson had referred to as it ‘a licentious and vagrant school’, however the Jena Set believed that creativeness was important for the method of gaining information. Novalis introduced that ‘the sciences should all be poeticised’, and scientist Alexander von Humboldt believed that we had to make use of our creativeness to make sense of the pure world. ‘What speaks to the soul,’ he mentioned, ‘escapes our measurements’.
On the centre of Romanticism have been aesthetics, magnificence and the significance of artwork – phrases which, for the Jena group, carried a deeply political and ethical which means. Let me unpack this. They’d all initially embraced the French Revolution however, as a whole lot of heads rolled off the guillotines throughout Maximilien Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, many Germans grew to become horrified. By 1795, Friedrich Schiller was arguing that the Enlightenment’s enshrinement of cause over feeling had led to the bloodshed of the French Revolution. Rational remark and empiricism might need inspired information, however they’d uncared for the refinement of ethical behaviour. All of the information on this planet couldn’t foster an individual’s judgment of right and wrong: it’d give them the flexibility to know pure legal guidelines or make medical advances similar to smallpox inoculations, even encourage them to want for common rights similar to liberty and equality, however the horrific excesses of the French Revolution have been bloodied proof that this was not sufficient.
Friedrich Schelling instructed his college students that every little thing was entangled into one dwelling organism
Societies in Europe have been pushed by revenue, productiveness and consumption. ‘Utility is the good idol of our time,’ Schiller bemoaned, ‘to which all powers pay homage.’ The humanities had been pushed apart. In his ‘Letters on the Aesthetic Schooling of Man’ (1795), Schiller claimed that solely magnificence would lead us in the direction of moral ideas and make us morally mature, for magnificence protected us in opposition to brutality and greed. Possibly the French had merely not been prepared for freedom and equality, he advised, as a result of with a view to be actually free, one needed to be morally mature. He didn’t imply a morality similar to constancy to a partner or a person’s sexuality – as a result of, in that division, the Jena Set undoubtedly had some enjoyable. What Schiller meant was the morality of a society that was prepared to manipulate itself. The French Revolution and the following atrocities had proven how pressing was the necessity for a philosophy of magnificence. ‘Artwork is a daughter of freedom,’ Schiller mentioned, and ‘it’s by magnificence that we attain freedom.’
The youthful era admired Schiller’s concepts. They believed, Friedrich Schelling mentioned, in a ‘revolution led to by philosophy’ – which is precisely what Schelling got down to do. At simply 20, he had already revealed his first philosophical e-book, adopted annually by one other one. By 23, he was so well-known that he grew to become the youngest professor on the College of Jena in 1798, enthralling college students together with his revolutionary concepts. There was a ‘secret bond connecting our thoughts with nature,’ he mentioned. Moderately than dividing the world into thoughts and matter as philosophers had completed for hundreds of years, Schelling instructed his college students that every little thing was entangled into one dwelling organism.
His college students have been so enraptured that their letters house described an virtually spiritual epiphany. Schelling’s new world was full of a ‘new, heat, glowing life,’ wrote one: it was alive. As a substitute of a mechanistic world the place people have been little greater than cogs in a machine, Schelling conjured a world of oneness. The self was an identical with nature, he insisted, and being in nature – be it in a forest or meadow, or scrambling up a mountain – was subsequently all the time additionally a journey into oneself. ‘Since we discover nature within the self,’ one in every of Schelling’s college students concluded, ‘we should additionally discover the self in nature.’ Schelling’s philosophy of oneness grew to become the heartbeat of Romanticism, influencing the English Romantics and the American Transcendentalists each. It flared out of Jena into the broader world.
Schelling’s impression on Coleridge’s considering is graphically illustrated by the modifications the English poet made to ‘The Eolian Harp’, a poem he had initially written in 1795. After learning Schelling’s works intensely, Coleridge republished the poem in 1817 with these new traces to the second verse:
O! the one Life inside us and overseas,
Which meets all movement and turns into its soul,
A light-weight in sound, a sound-like energy in gentle,
Rhythm in all thought …
After Coleridge discovered German, he continued to learn the works of the Jena Set. Although he studied Fichte’s Ich-philosophy, Coleridge was a ‘Schellingianer’, mentioned one in every of his pals (who had studied below Schelling in Jena), somebody who ‘metaphysicised à la Schelling’. So obsessed was Coleridge that he translated large chunks of Schelling’s work, then handed them off as his personal. He was significantly fascinated by Schelling’s thought of the unity between thoughts and nature. Web page after web page, paragraph by paragraph, Coleridge inserted Schelling’s sentences into his literary autobiography Biographia Literaria, describing how he had moved from the materialistic view of British empiricists to German idealistic philosophy. A baby of the Enlightenment, Coleridge had initially agreed with the empiricists that the thoughts was like a clean sheet of paper that crammed up over a lifetime with information that got here from sensory expertise alone. However, after learning the works of the Jena Set, he grew to become a proponent of Idealism – a college of thought that believed that ‘concepts’ or the thoughts, not materials issues, represent our actuality.
When his Biographia Literaria was revealed in 1817, Coleridge’s pal Thomas De Quincey accused him of ‘bare-faced plagiarism’, insisting ‘your entire essay, from the primary phrase to the final, is a verbatim translation from Schelling.’ However Coleridge did the identical factor with August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Artwork and Literature, from which he imported lengthy passages for his personal Shakespeare lectures in London.
Having didn’t journey to Jena in 1798, Coleridge, along with Wordsworth, lastly met August Wilhelm Schlegel 30 years later in 1828. Displaying off his German expertise, Coleridge instructed August Wilhelm that by no means had any translation of any sort of work in any language been as nice as his of Shakespeare. To which August Wilhelm pleaded: ‘Mein lieber Herr, would you converse English? I perceive it; however your German I can’t observe.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, too, studied August Wilhelm Schlegel’s work. In March 1818, as he and his spouse Mary Shelley have been travelling by France to satisfy Lord Byron in Switzerland, he learn aloud Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Artwork and Literature for six lengthy days.
Coleridge was not the one one to study German with a view to examine the works of the Jena Set. The American Transcendentalists, who gathered within the small Massachusetts city of Harmony within the 1830s and ’40s, have been equally eager to grasp the language. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s elder brother had impelled him to ‘study German as quick as you may.’ Studying lists included Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Fichte, Schelling and, later, Novalis and Humboldt. And those that couldn’t learn German studied the works by English editions similar to Madame de Staël’s bestselling e-book Germany (1810), Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Thomas Carlyle’s broadly learn essays, evaluations and translations in Overseas Overview and different journals.
Jena’s mental reign was temporary and important, and its affect was lasting
Emerson’s library was full of books by Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Humboldt, Fichte, Schelling and the Schlegel brothers. His well-known essay Nature (1836), which grew to become the Transcendentalists’ manifesto, was deeply influenced by Schelling’s philosophy of oneness. Every leaf, crystal or animal was a part of the entire, Emerson defined, ‘[e]ach particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.’ We are nature, Emerson wrote, as a result of ‘the thoughts is part of the character of issues.’
Emerson’s pal Henry David Thoreau was equally immersed within the concepts popping out of Jena, and specifically Alexander von Humboldt’s work. He crammed his journal with observations concerning the pure world – from the chirping of crickets and the easy actions of fish to the primary delicate blooms of the 12 months. Thoreau’s each day entries report his visceral sense of his synchrony with nature and the altering seasons – or what he referred to as the ‘mysterious relation between myself & these items’. At one with nature, he felt the unity the Jena Set had described. ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?’ he requested in Walden (1854). For Thoreau, the examine of nature in the end grew to become a examine of his personal self. After his years at Walden Pond, for instance, he described a lake as ‘earth’s eye’ and, by trying into it, the ‘beholder measures the depth of his personal nature’.
There have been many different Jena acolytes: Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville. Poe’s final main work, for instance, the 130-page prose poem Eureka (1848) was devoted to Alexander von Humboldt, and a direct response to Humboldt’s worldwide bestseller Cosmos (1845). It was Poe’s try and survey the Universe – together with all issues ‘religious and materials’ – echoing Humboldt’s method of together with the exterior and the inner world. Like Coleridge, Poe additionally lifted a number of pages from August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Artwork and Literature, and revealed them verbatim below his personal identify. Whitman’s poetry assortment Leaves of Grass (1855) is one other instance of the Jena Set’s worldwide enchantment. Whitman considered it as a poetic distillation of the ‘nice System of Idealistic Philosophy in Germany’. In a single poem, he launched himself as ‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of many roughs, a kosmos’ – maybe a nod to Humboldt’s Cosmos, which the poet reportedly saved on his desk as he composed Leaves of Grass.
Romantic poetry, August Wilhelm Schlegel had argued in Lectures on Dramatic Artwork and Literature was ‘the expression of the key attraction to a chaos … which is perpetually striving after new and great births.’ It was a sentiment that appealed to American Transcendentalists and British Romantics alike, simply as a lot as Schelling’s unity of thoughts and matter, and Humboldt’s idea of nature as a dwelling organism.
Jena’s mental reign was temporary and important, and its affect was lasting. The Jena Set put the self on the centre of their considering, redefined our relationship with nature, and heralded Romanticism as a global motion. These concepts have seeped deeply into our tradition and behavior: the self, for higher or worse, has remained centre stage ever since, and their idea of nature as a dwelling organism is the foundation of our understanding of the pure world at the moment. We nonetheless assume with the minds of those visionary thinkers, see with their imaginations, and really feel with their feelings.
