Hymns to the Night

Novalis's Hymns to the Night is not only one of the seminal documents of German Romanticism as well as of modern poetry and poetic experimentation, it is also one of the landmarks of Sophiology. The poem, which shifts from poetic forms to prose, from biography to the realm of the spirit, and from the historical to the transcendent, discloses to the reader a world ever new, as the poet scales the heights of poetic inspiration and touches divinity.

Mabel Cotterell is sensitive both to Novalis'...