Late eighteenth-century thought was profoundly influenced by the mathematics of infinity and infinitesimals in Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Leonhard Euler. Immanuel Kant's pronouncement in the Critique of Pure Reason that the spatio-temporal world is neither finite nor infinite, along with his doctrine of the mathematical sublime in the Critique of Judgment, set the stage for the accounts of singularity, totality, and the absolute that emerge in Johann of the most familiar Romantic motifs presents the conceptualization of the unconditioned as a perpetual striving after an unattainable goal. Characterized as the asymptotic approach to a limit, this dynamic is often illustrated with a diagram from analytic geometry showing the distance between a curve and a line nearing zero as the two tend to infinity. This "endlose Annäherung," as Friedrich Schlegel terms it, is first and foremost an emblem of tension or contradiction (Studien des klassischen Altertums 255). As boundlessly precise imprecision, such a process is constitutively imperfect and open-ended, its telos uncertain, yet it remains unsurpassed in the exactitude of its execution. The privilege accorded infinite approximation by Romantic authors highlights their investment in irreducibly provisional programs whose coherence and integrity are permanently under threat. But it is also a reminder of the substantial advances that had taken place in infinitesimal calculus, which by Schlegel's time was generating algorithms of considerable accuracy, distinguishing itself as a discourse of continuity as much as discontinuity.The Romantic concern with the interplay of verbal and mathematical dynamics raises the question of whether sentences or words may relate asymptotically. On a larger scale, could one speak of the infinite approach of one poem to another? In this article, I will explore the concept of proximity in Romantic poetry and poetics by focusing on a small constellation of terms: nah, beinahe, and annähern. As the invocation of an asymptotic function implies, what is at issue is less a static set of fixed elements than a dynamic of forces of uncertain provenance. Even the exposition of the word near proves a challenging task. As much as it describes the arrangement of objects in space or metaphorically characterizes relations between abstract terms, nearness also seems to pre-exist and even enable relationships, thereby proving central to the Romantic account of seminar 50:3 (September 2014)