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This course takes as its point of departure Klopstock’s efforts to model German poetry after music—“the harmony of the spheres”—which served as the impetus for Goethe’s and Schiller’s poetry and Hölderlin’s late hymns. We will examine his experiments with verse form and his notion of interiority as the backdrop for Herder’s theory of the Volkslied as a popular genre that joins word and music and expresses the soul of a nation. Music and poetry will emerge on the one hand as the glue that binds a community and on the other as a disruptive force that isolates its members. Its significance as a figure if not vehicle for transcendence will return again and again in works as varied as Achim von Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Kleist’s “Heilige Cäcilie,” Hölderlin’s poetological writings, Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, and Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie among other texts.