This book is a work of comparative literature. It investigates connections between philosophy and literature in the Romantic era, or what is called the Age of Goethe within German studies. More specifically it is interested in intersections between the absolute idealism of Schelling and Hölderlin—their response to Fichte’s response to Kant—and metaphors of dynamic creativity and oneness that arise in both literary and philosophical texts in the years around 1800. It is also a study of some aspects of the broader movement of Hellenism that was so powerfully in evidence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The idealization of “Greece” and the conception of nature that arose from absolute idealism, most clearly evidenced by Schelling’s Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature), work strategically together in an attempt to carve out a space for nature, beauty, and eros within the idealist system, or in response to it. Philosophy becomes poetry, poetry philosophy.