Prevailing Winds: Marx as Romantic Poet

Abstract

Inspired by Charles Taylor’s locating of Herder and Rousseau’s “expressivism” in Marx’s understanding of the human as artist, I begin this essay by examining expressivism in Taylor, followed by its counterpart in M. H. Abrams’s work, namely the wind as metaphor in British Romantic poetry. I then further explore this expressivism/wind connection in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Marx’s The German Ideology . Ultimately I conclude that these expressive winds lead to poetic gesture per se, and thereby, to a kind of poetry at the heart of Marx’s philosophy.