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It would not be rewarding to carry this comparison too far, however, but a line may be drawn between the eighteenth century and the restoration of the spiritual and metaphysical sources of the self to the present day. This may again seem strange, since so much of what passed in between these two points allied itself with science, including Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s sense that poetry and science served different and complementary functions, the pseudoscientific formal conceits of Modernism, the spiritualization of technology of the American Sublime (i.e., Whitman, Melville, etc.) and so on. However, all of these responses on the part of poets to science maintain a belief in the transcendental sources of poetry, even when, or perhaps most markedly when, they profess to have no such belief. Language Poetry, with its adoption of academic, post-Frankfurt School discourse (in its paratexts) and its use of style as an antidote, or a relief, from hegemonic, media-influenced language patterns, is more resolutely and dryly intellectual than Pope could ever hope to be.
Before Eliot disparaged the “dissociation of sensibility” that occurred after the seventeenth century, whose devotional poetry was a perfect marriage of passion and intellect, Friedrich Schiller, who took Kant’s aesthetics a step further towards Romanticism, saw the same breach—only he looked back at the classical era as the golden age when reason and inspiration stood in perfect balance. Oddly, though, I would locate a breach between the material or empirical and the ideal or transcendental in the Liberalism of Kant and Schiller themselves. Locke’s protopsychological view of the self as composed of parts, much as Newton divided the physical world into components, added strength to the idea that individuals—even those of low social standing—could be important contributors to society. Locke believed in the natural rights of individuals and was scornful of “intuitionists” in the mold of Descartes, which believed in innate ideas that are simply known to be true. Kant’s response to empiricism was a respectful one, but was motivated by some urgency. Hume, in Kant’s famous formulation, had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers.” Kant challenged Hume’s skepticism about God and free will with neointuitionist arguments, but, in the Third Critique, suggested a kind of freedom whose very quality of liberation lay in its separation from the empirical.