Because poetry is unconstrained by the natural properties of its signs, poetry can represent any subject matter in the proper hands.

In fact, Herder suggests two different classifications of the arts, and a central challenge in the interpretation of his aesthetics is to see how they are connected. In the first of the Groves of Criticism, Herder argues that Lessing’s distinction between the visual arts as the representation of objects in space at a single moment in time and poetry as the representation of a succession of events in time confuses poetry with music. Lessing thereby misses what is essential to poetry altogether, n