Against this rationalizing tide, poetry holds a special status as the “art of arts”—a phrase reflecting the longstanding view in Western thought that poetry is the highest, most generative form of artistic expression. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), ranks poetry as supreme among the arts because its origin lies in genius rather than in prescribed rule: it arises from a productive imagination that invents new ways of seeing, rather than from the application of established techniques. Whereas many other arts can lean on codified methods or formal recipes—rules of perspective in painting, harmony in music, or proportion in architecture—poetry depends on an original power to shape language, image, and feeling into forms that themselves become models of taste. This grants it a privileged freedom from mere imitation or technical constraint, making it, for Kant, the art in which the creative capacities of the mind manifest in their highest, least derivative form.

For Kant, aesthetic judgment reveals a distinctive way of relating to the world that is neither purely logical nor merely practical. In experiences of beauty, the mind senses a “purposiveness without purpose”: forms seem as though they were arranged for our enjoyment and understanding, even though they serve no definite concept, use, or goal. Imagination and understanding enter into a “free play,” harmonizing without being forced into a fixed rule or calculation. In this state, the mind encounters form as if it were meaningfully ordered for it, while remaining irreducible to clear-cut definitions or utilitarian functions.

That is why the beautiful and the sublime are exemplary for Kant: they suggest a world that feels oddly “fitted” to our faculties, hinting at an accord between mind and nature that cannot be captured in mechanical terms alone. Poetry, as the art that most intensely stages this free play of images, feelings, and ideas, becomes a privileged site where rational beings can experience a felt resonance with the world that is neither dogmatic belief nor mere subjective fantasy—a fragile enclave of enchantment that persists within the very heart of critical philosophy.

Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff’s account of the Gesamtkunstwerk, articulated in his 1827 work Ästhetik oder Lehre von Weltanschauung und Kunst, radicalizes this aesthetic insight by envisioning an artwork in which multiple media—poetry, music, image, movement—are bound into an internally unified whole that functions less like a loose collection of artworks and more like a structured event. In his view, poetry supplies the integrating syntax: through naming, narrative, and metaphor, it organizes the other arts into a coherent experiential arc that can reorient the spectator’s inner life, generating a sense of internal unity and wholeness. Gesamtkunstwerk thus anticipates a kind of secular liturgy, a deliberately composed configuration of forms that can shape perception, affect, and interpretation so that the total work of art changes the audience from within rather than remaining a passive spectacle. In this lineage, poetry and the total work of art together trace a path by which aesthetic form can become a force of ritualization, binding reflection, feeling, and world-making into a single practice; this is precisely the strand of Trahndorff that IVOIRE most directly takes up.

In the twentieth century, this aesthetic response to disenchantment—treating art as a site of inner reconfiguration rather than mere representation—is taken up and reframed at the level of culture and consciousness by thinkers such as Morris Berman, who explicitly pose the question of how a disenchanted world might be re-enlivened.