Joe Henderson offers a critique of the assumption that poetic form in the book of Jeremiah indicates authenticity. This assumption undergirds Bernhard Duhms reconstructions (1901) of the prophets biography and the books composition, the basic components of the dominant paradigm for twentieth-century Jeremiah scholarship. Henderson argues that Duhms model is best understood as an attempt to bring the book into conformity with nineteenth-century systems of aesthetics, historiography, and theology-and with the Grafian reconstruction of the history of Israels religion. The accord between these systems and Duhms assumption about poetic form has less to do with their common grasp of the historical reality of Hebrew prophecy than with their common roots in the Romantic theory of prophetic and poetic inspiration-a theory forged by Robert Lowth in his exposition (1752) of the poetry he found in the prophetic books.