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