1. The young Friedrich Schiller wrote The Robbers (1781), a play that made him an overnight sensation. To deepen his education, he plunged into Kantian philosophy. As a result:
His imagination, he feared, had abandoned him. Philosophical enquiries into Immanuel Kant’s philosophy had somehow eradicated his poetic sensibilities, and he felt that he was neither a poet nor a philosopher. ‘Imagination disturbs my abstract thinking,’ Schiller would tell Goethe later, ‘and cold reason my poetry.’
Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (2022), emphasis added.
2. Heinrich Kleist committed suicide at age 34. His reading of Kant had the following effect upon him:
“Kleist in his youth had espoused with enthusiasm all the optimism of the Enlightenment. Reason would conquer all; happiness would come with experience and understanding. In March 1801, however, by his own account, he seems to have encountered the thought of Immanuel Kant (it is not clear what precisely he read), and his world fell apart. By testing the nature and limits of human knowledge, Kant had sought primarily to establish the possibility of a meaningful metaphysics. To Kleist, however, it was much grimmer than that: Kant had shown, he believed, that empirical knowledge was unreliable, reason illusory, truth unattainable and life quite meaningless. ‘My sole and highest goal has vanished,’ he wrote. ‘Now I have none.’”
Sources: Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, Ian Brunskill. Also see “Kant and German Idealism,” Chapter 6 of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, p. 270 (or p. 265 of this Google Books edition, pp. 192-3), emphasis added.
Related: Immanuel Kant’s first Critique, in the Philosophers, Explained series:
In the novel, Dune, Frank Hurbert depicts fear as the mind killer. As such, it is a temporary condition. Immanuel Kant is a more thorough and permanent mind killer.