Musicality and the Limits of Meaning in Wordsworth and Kant

Abstract

I argue that the difficulty Kant encounters in evaluating music in the third Critique is caused by his problematic attempt to separate sound (the physical phenomenon) from meaning. Analogously, Wordsworth attempts in the Preface to divide metrical pleasure and the feeling derived from the semantic meaning of poems. In both cases, this separation can be overcome by a radical, Romantic understanding of musicality, whereby music not only participates in meaning but becomes its grounds. While this remains latent in Kant, Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ can assert the centrality of listening to thinking, which has important implications for his poetics.