UNDERLYING THIS PAPER is a methodological issue. I am a student of British poetry, in particular British from Milton in about 1650 to Wordsworth up to about 1830. My study aims to achieve the general intel ligibility that arises from connecting particular poems into a historical nar rative set within a broad cultural context. To create this simultaneously connective and interpretive narrative, I need a language with some special capacities. It has to bring out issues that are perceptibly important to the particular poems I have chosen to write about. It must be applicable with enough consistency over a historical range of poems to establish a continu ity against which changes take on significance. And it must let a reader glimpse a background that gives depth and scope to whatever is at stake in particular poems. The methodological question is whether I may legitimately draw any or all ofthat language from Kant. Here are some arguments against doing so. 1. While Kant wrote in this historical period, he did not know the English poetic tradition, and hence, he cannot be responding to its specific concerns. Moreover, the poet I am interested in, Wordsworth, did not read Kant and cannot have been supported by Kant in whatever thinking goes on in his poetry. Using Kant as part of a historical argument will force me to postulate a Zeitgeist that will remain obscure and amorphous and will fail to meet the criteria of precision, concreteness, and clear instantia tion that govern historical writing. 2. Apart from the historical issue, Kant is a philosopher. Philosophy weighs the truth of ideas by formulating them precisely and examining arguments for and against them. Even when is explicitly a poetry of ideas, it works by bringing out the potential of ideas to serve as the sub stance shaped into forms a reader can perceive with satisfaction. If Lucre tius's De rerum natura is a brilliant poem ?and it is ?that counts neither for nor against Epicurean philosophy. If I use Kant's concepts to describe even philosophical poems, I will cancel what is specifically poetical about them. At the same time, I will illegitimately force the poems to answer questions they did not ask.