Newton in the poetry of Friedrich Schiller

Abstract This article attempts to explain the peculiar role of Isaac Newton in the poetry of Friedrich Schiller. I show that Newtonian ideas appear from the earliest poems in Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782 wherein gravity is used mainly as a metaphor for love. Newton is made a culprit, in Schiller's cosmological poems, for the destruction of the spheres and for the poet's despair in the ‘empty’, Newtonian universe. I chart the changing role of Newton in the later poetry of Schiller, where it is mainly his Opticks that interests the poet, who at this point has a thoroughly negative idea of the scientist, probably inspired by Goethe. Newton's famous experiment with the prism is figured as being the opposite of the poetry with which Schiller sought to unify (rather than refract) nature.