An Ironic Approach to the Absolute: Schlegel's Poetic Mysticism brings Friedrich Schlegel's ironic fragments in dialogue with the Dao De Jing and John Ashbery's Flow Chart to argue that poetic texts offer an intuition of the whole because they resist the reader's desire to comprehend them fully.

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 An Ironic Approach
• 2 To Be Ironic Is Divine: Hegel’s Aesthetics and the Threat of Irony
• 3 Another Way to the Absolute:Language and Naming in the Dao De Jing
• 4 How to Read a River:Poetic Mysticism in John Ashbery’s Flow Chart
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author