Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic

James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher, and a composer – Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven – developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures – all born in 1770 – developed this idea in both metaphorical and ...