The great poet and polymath Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, was long seen as representing a particular brand of German Romanticism, embodying a predilection for the mystical and the irrational and a longing for death. Yet 20th-century scholars debunked that myth and arrived at a view of the poet as one who produced a unified, precociously modern body of work in which human systems of individual and collective being as well as knowledge and its disciplines exist as fictional structures, as represented possibility rather than fixed truth. As such, all being and knowledge could and...