The combination of effects from painting and music, achieved through artificial signs, enables poetry to engage deeper emotions than either art form alone.

Leave aside the fact that the poems of the supposed Ossian were concocted in eighteenth-century Edinburgh by James MacPherson, and were thus very much made for paper and print. Leave aside as well Herder’s supposition that the most dynamic poetry can only be composed by a “barbarous people,” Mycenaen Greeks or Scottish highlanders. The point remains that he connects the “living presence of the images” achieved by the most effective poetry with a corresponding feeling of freedom and of being aliv