The power of poetry, a topos since Plato, undergoes a radical transformation in literary texts between 1770 and 1830. Concepts of divine or unconscious inspiration or of the overwhelming impacts of poetry are recast in notions of the transformative potentials of poetry. The author discusses these reconfigurations of poetic power in the context of early thermodynamic thinking, where the world presents itself not as a mechanism but as a self-organised metabolism. In images of nature as well as in machine-like arrangements for burning and consuming, breathing and eating, Goethe and Novalis develop models of a formal dynamic that, along with Herder and W. v. Humboldt, can be understood as energeia, i.e., as continuous shaping and reshaping. - Rewrites the long history of force in natural philosophy and poetics of the 17th and 18th centuries Takes up current initiatives of energy studies Goethe and Novalis as observers of the entry into fossil combustion cultures

Cornelia Zumbusch, *1972 Kabul; since 2013, Professor of Modern German Literature, University of Hamburg, specialising in 18th and 19th century literature; since 2015, Codirector Warburg-Haus Hamburg; since 2019, spokesperson DFG Collaborative Research Group "Imaginarien der Kraft", research interests include problems of poetics and the genesis of literary forms, as well as questions posed by image and cultural studies around and after 1900