Unendliche Natur

Abstract Albrecht von Haller’s ≫Unvollkommenes Gedicht uber die Ewigkeit≪ (1737/42-1748) reflects the reciprocal relationship among empirical observation of the world, imagination and human self-determination. In Haller’s poem, the grief over the death of a friendn triggers religious and secular reflections on finiteness and eternity. Faced with the knowledge of the infinity of time and space in the Copernican universe, the imagination is plunged into a crisis that leaves the speaking and reflecting ego struggling for words. The linguistic search is an open process and the poem remains unfinished - a fragment due to the subject matter. The paper analyzes the poetic process of this crisis and illustrates how the experience of the sublime, evoked by the amazement at the multiplicity of worlds, is mixed with a melancholy fear of one’s own forlornness and placelessness in the face of cosmic infinity.