ABSTRACT
The methodological outlines of German garden theory in the 1790s bear the unmistakable imprint of Kant's philosophy. The persistence of the architectonic model of reason in German thought, especially as it is one of the few assumptions of the Leibniz-Wolff tradition that Kant retained uncritically, should give us pause. Kant's turn to the topographical, although generally overshadowed by his employment of architectural language, has not gone entirely unnoticed by those with a special interest in the systematics of his philosophy. One dimension of Kant's problem lies in the fact that the "nature" of which he and other theorists speak is in fact a highly complex and intensively cultivated entity. By choosing speech as the most apt comparison, Kant draws a direct link between aesthetic judgment and discourse. For Kant, poetry is essentially the stimulation of the imagination through the medium of words.
