This book provides a study of linguistic force and its influence on poetry in the nineteenth century. The idea of poetic force can be traced ultimately to a thesis implicit in Kantian philosophy: that of an a priori capacity of language to free itself from having empirical content. This linguistic capacity, which is derived indirectly from a cognitive incapacity occasioned by spectacles of dynamic sublimity, emerges as a key motif or theme in Kant's thinking. But the very ability to communicate or produce the feeling of this force of language is also accompanied by an unforce that must be felt ... More

This book provides a study of linguistic force and its influence on poetry in the nineteenth century. The idea of poetic force can be traced ultimately to a thesis implicit in Kantian philosophy: that of an a priori capacity of language to free itself from having empirical content. This linguistic capacity, which is derived indirectly from a cognitive incapacity occasioned by spectacles of dynamic sublimity, emerges as a key motif or theme in Kant's thinking. But the very ability to communicate or produce the feeling of this force of language is also accompanied by an unforce that must be felt in Kant's writing even as it remains (perhaps aptly) unstressed. In this sense the productivity of the poetic force emerging in Kantian philosophy is haunted by the unproductivity of apoetic unforce. After drawing out this theory of force and unforce, in particular on the basis of Walter Benjamin's reinterpretation of Kantian aesthetics and moral philosophy, the main chapters of this book go on to trace this dynamic in the writing of three poets working in diverse languages and different intellectual contexts more or less directly influenced by Kantian philosophy: Friedrich HÖlderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold.