Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Holderlin, Verlaine, George, Morike, and Yeats in detail, Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. This study delves into the irresolvable conflict between a poem's guise as quasi-architectural stasis and quasi-musical kinesis.

The concept of secular millennialism summarizes a crucial point made by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: that twentieth-century totalitarian movements, in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union under Stalin, are not nationalistic but essentially millennialist, focused on the achievement of a universal world order. The question of whether totalitarian thinking can be located in a secular millennialist tradition is brought to the forefront in Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler by Benjamin Bennett. Bennett contends that...

Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Holderlin, Verlaine, George, Morike, and Yeats in detail, Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. This study delves into the irresolvable conflict between a poem's guise as quasi-architectural stasis and quasi-musical kinesis."