Martensen’s Review of Heiberg’s New Poemsand the Discussion on Speculative Poetry and the Crisis of the Age

In this article I offer an introduction to Hans Lassen Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s New Poems, published in 1841. In his treatise On the Significance of Philosophyof 1833, the poet and philosopher Johan Ludvig Heiberg presented a diagnosis of what he perceived as the cultural crisis of the time. In his view, Danish society was afflicted by a frivolous and nihilistic worldview. A Hegel enthusiast, Heiberg thought that the cure for the crisis lay in a new philosophical perspective, capable of finding the universal and infinite within the particular and finite. But this was only possible to communicate through literature and, more specifically, through what he called speculative poetry.In the following years, Heiberg and his friend and colleague Martensen developed the notion of this new genre. This didactic campaign culminated with the publication of Heiberg’s New Poems, especially the piece “A Soul after Death,” accompanied by the review composed by Martensen.