ABSTRACT
The art of poetry was closest to Immanuel Kant. He had even tried his own hand at it once or twice, and those small examples of his attempts which came to the eyes of Jachmann the latter considered, 'rich in ideas and powerfully expressed'. Kant regarded rhyme as being second only to poetic content in its importance in the constitution of a fine poem. 'He did not admit the claim of any poem to the title, if it were not in rhyme or at least metrical. Unrhymed poetry he called prose gone mad and could find no pleasure in it whatever'. Moreover, in his fortieth year, while he was still a magister, Kant was offered the chair of poetry at Konigsberg University. He could never recall without repugnance the occasion on which he had been present at a performance of funeral music on the death of Moses Mendelssohn, which had consisted, in his own expression, of a ceaseless, tedious whining.
