Novalis

Describing aspects of nature’s beauty in his poem “The Meadow,” the German philosopher-poet Novalis — a founding figure of German Romanticism — ended each stanza with the same refrain: “Yet what this was, or what befell,/ I do not know, I cannot tell.”

Novalis believed that art and romanticism were basically synonymous.

Abrams quotes the 18th-century German Romantic Novalis: "The higher philosophy is concerned with the marriage of Nature and Mind."

She argues that the Romantics — including Goethe, Schiller and Hegel, as well as some lesser-known figures, such as the philosophers Fichte and Schelling, the critics Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and the poet Novalis — handed down to us the modern notion of the self as essentially free.

As Novalis had it, in “poeticizing,” the self demonstrates that it is free.