Chapter 21 examines Goethe’s relationship to German Idealism. Although the speculative nature of the Idealist method appears alien to Goethe’s own thought, and he himself expressed reservations about it, his poetic and scientific works display a significant degree of sympathy with the concerns that motivated his contemporaries. The chapter highlights the importance of Spinoza in the alignment between Goethe and Idealist thought, before considering in detail the significance of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and above all Schelling, whose philosophy of nature and art is particularly resonant with Goethe’s own.

Chapter 20 reflects on Goethe’s unique way of thinking and his persistent challenges to orthodoxy. It builds on Goethe’s own assertion that he was ‘not naturally equipped to do philosophy in its proper sense’, and argues that his thought engages the figurative power of ‘improper’ (that is, poetic) language to do philosophical work. The chapter notes his criticism of the modes of, among others, Kant and Hegel, and highlights places in Goethe’s oeuvre, including in his literary works, where we can see new and unconventional pathways for thought being built.

This chapter analyses the novels’ poetic language, presenting some preliminary sondages which might indicate how much poetic vocabulary there is in three of our five complete Greek texts, and how much has classical and Hellenistic ancestry. It also looks selectively at the lexicon of some near-contemporary poets. Eight tables illustrate these heterogeneous sondages. After reviewing terms in Longus evoking epic, early melic poetry, and epigram, and some technical terms, it concludes that many words in Valley’s 1926 lists are not ‘simply’ poetic but are chosen to trigger some intertextuality, while others have little claim to be ‘poetic’ at all. Those remaining that cannot so be explained are few. Longus’ prose may be poetic in terms of his Theocritean subject, rhythmical sentences, and preference for parataxis over subordination: but his language is chiefly the language of prose. A brief overview of a small selection of potentially ‘poetic’ words in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus suggests that they too have only a low proportion of ‘poetic’ words, a view corroborated by the paucity of ‘poetic’ words in Marcellus poems from the Via Appia, in the poet(s) of the Sacerdos monument at Nicaea, and in a sample from Ps.-Oppian’s Cynegetica that are also in the novelists. It concludes that in this period poets and writers of novelistic prose still draw vocabulary from two different linguistic pools.

Verbal silence is examined and illustrated in light of the communicative functions it serves and the cooperative maxims it fulfils. Our starting point is Jakobson’s (1960) model. Each of Jakobson’s six functions (the referential function, emotive, conative, phatic, poetic and metalinguistic) is considered here in terms of the manner in which it is served by verbal silence in general, and particularly by iconic depictions of absences and presences (such as trauma or the shortage of words) as well as communicative events in which verbal silence is the unmarked means fulfilling the communicative function (such as in turn switching and the expression of threats). In addition to illuminating the functions served by verbal silence, this examination also contributes to the discovery of the circumstantial function overlooked by Jakobson and to the refinement of broadly studied linguistic issues such as the distinction between questions cooperatively answered in silence and rhetorical questions and the fundamental difference in terms of the function of silence between silence as consent and the right to silence. The unique pragmatic quality of verbal silence to activate the addressee moving hem to the addresser’s position is discussed and illustrated throughout our discussion of the communicative functions played by verbal silence.

The introduction summarizes the content of each section and distinguishes the selective focus on rhetorical texts, rhetorical reading practices and the communication between poets and rhetorical theorists employed in the book from previous studies typically geared towards enumerating technical elements of style and arrangement that any given poet is said to have “borrowed” from rhetorical critics.