the archetypal art form because the arbitrary character of its medium –
language – ensured the maximum amount of freedom from material
constraint. ‘No content is in principle unavailable’, as J. M. Bernstein
puts it, so that ‘the arbitrary sign’s systematic distance from materiality
converges with the freedom of the imagination in a way that is the inverse
of the convergence of the syntactical constraints of materiality with the
holistic logic of physical beauty’.^30 Hence poetry was elevated above all
plastic arts. But rhyme, stress and rhythmic pattern all refuse the complete
disappearance of the material qualities of the word in the freedom of the
imagination. Poetic form sets up an aesthetic frame in which the external-
ity of sound, vowel, consonant and inherent stress-pattern is heard as
meaningfully organised. It matters that the poem has these words and no
others, not only because the combination of their ideal content is unique,
but because their sound combination makes them untranslatable. Hence
by asserting theinsistentmateriality of the sign, poetic form ultimately
became seen as opposed to the undetermined freedom of the imagination.
For the Jena Romantics discussed in chapter 1 , the idea of poetry culmin-
ates in the novel, because prose collapses the opposition between the
words’ particular material form and their meaningful content, and hence
offers more expansive possibilities of expression.^31 For Hegel, the material
of poetry was something ultimately to be discarded in art’s progress
towards absolute Spirit:
Art frames laws which are supposed every time to harmonize in general with the
character of the material to be presented, but in detail they preclude both longs
and shorts and the accent from being solely determined by the spiritual meaning
and from being rigorously subject to it. But the more inward and spiritual the
artistic imagination becomes... it is so concentrated in itself that it strips away
the, as it were, corporeal side of language and in what remains emphasises only
that wherein the spiritual meaning lies for the purpose of communication, and
leaves the rest as significant by-play.^32
Or in other words, poetry’s ‘spiritual meaning’ is free from any de-
pendence on the words themselves, the poem is nothing but its mental
meaning, and can therefore be translated without loss, as Hegel infam-
ously goes on to argue. Criticism that pays attention to the patterns and
rhymes of poetry, on the other hand, would always be an acknowledge-
ment of the tension between a poem’s irreducible particularity, its fini-
tude, and the multitude of situations and meanings to which it might
ideally be related. The price of paying attention to that particularity,
however, is the poem’s resistance to being subsumed under any reading,
including all the ones in this book. But if the poem’s form emphasises the
Introduction: the poetry wars 13