James H. Donelan. Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780521130165. Price: US$34.99

James Donelan’s book explores the relationship between music, philosophy, and poetry in the romantic period, and how these three entities converge around the notion of self-consciousness. The study is genuinely cross-disciplinary in that the author demonstrates his proficiency in philosophical, poetic, and musical discourse. The theoretical core of this study emerges through summaries of the various versions of self-consciousness in Idealist philosophy, from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel. Donelan himself clearly adopts an Idealist position, but his aim is to place philosophy into a reciprocal relationship with music and poetry, as he explores “how and why the idea of self-consciousness came to such prominence simultaneously in both philosophy and music and how poetic discourse mediated between the two” (31). The author therefore seeks to coordinate his philosophical deliberations with close readings of selected poems by Hölderlin and Wordsworth, as well as a detailed musicological analysis of one of Beethoven’s late string quartets. However, while the author’s particular focus is how music came to be heard as a “metaphor for self-consciousness” (154), his broader aim, most clearly and forcefully articulated in the last, brief chapter of the book, is to reaffirm the autonomous value of “the aesthetic,” and to do so from a humanistic perspective: “We need the aesthetic to restore our knowledge of who we are”. The reason for the enduring appeal of Beethoven’s music, he claims, is that it embodies the “hope for reintegration of the self through beauty” (177). The alignment of music with self-consciousness takes place through what Donelan calls “Romantic musical aesthetics,” and this is the first term over which the reader may stumble. Of all the philosophers included in this study, only Schelling commonly receives the designation of “Romantic philosopher,” but there are a number of even more troubling omissions. Romantic music aesthetics first emerges in the 1790’s in the musical essays and narratives of Wilhelm H. Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck. While these writings are not widely known, it is strange that they would not even be mentioned in a book with this title. E. T. A. Hoffmann, a much more well-known figure in the English-speaking world, whose essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music is one of the canonical texts of Romantic music aesthetics, mainly appears as a foil to Hegel (88-90). Given Donelan’s focus on self-consciousness, it is clear why these figures would not receive much attention. It was these Romantics who established music as an autonomous art-form, i.e. one that had a certain philosophical or spiritual dignity in its own right, even and especially when it was not accompanied by language. At first, however, it was not at all clear that the autonomy of the musical artwork could be aligned with the autonomy of the self. For Hoffmann in particular, this autonomy is associated with the uncanny self-organization of the automaton, as it appears in so many of his tales. Underlying the dubious question of who “is” and “isn’t” a romantic, then, there is also a more tractable philosophical issue. As the readers of this journal are more aware than most, romanticism is notoriously difficult to define. Implicitly, the author identifies romanticism with the “assertion of independent subjectivity and the primacy of the aesthetic” (176). While the latter term is less controversial, the identification of romanticism with an Idealist conception of “independent subjectivity” is not obvious or un-problematic. In fact, Donelan’s thesis cuts against the grain of a generally accepted narrative concerning the emergence of German romanticism, according to which the “birth” of this movement is dated not to Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and that work’s positing of the “absolute ego,” but to the …