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...Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth's Magic Horn, 1806–8), was dedicated to Goethe, and was described by him as an essential volume for any household. Something of the impulse underlying this interest in folk-song is shown by the preface to a collection by J.G. Naumann (1784): The times in which dazzling and forced styles found approval are past. Men who had a deeper feeling...

...doesn’t suit the poem. A light-hearted poem might rely on strong rhyme (and a dum-de-dum rhythm). However, a more facile rhyme won’t suit a more contemplative poem, for example. If we impose rhyme too early in the process, we risk sacrificing the content to the form, before we’ve even discovered the theme of our poem. When we write, we’re panning for gold. We often find we’re not actually writing the poem we think we’......

...de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so. It strikes us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic. Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this conversion. Neural transmissions just seem like the wrong kind of...