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Prevailing Winds: Marx as Romantic Poet
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 37, Number 2, October 2013
- pp. 343-359
- 10.1353/phl.2013.0027
- Article
- Additional Information
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Inspired by Charles Taylor’s locating of Herder and Rousseau’s “expressivism” in Marx’s understanding of the human as artist, I begin this essay by examining expressivism in Taylor, followed by its counterpart in M. H. Abrams’s work, namely the wind as metaphor in British Romantic poetry. I then further explore this expressivism/wind connection in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Marx’s The German Ideology. Ultimately I conclude that these expressive winds lead to poetic gesture per se, and thereby, to a kind of poetry at the heart of Marx’s philosophy.