Friedrich Schlegel
Poetry should mix all forms and never be finished, and irony lets the mind float freely above its own creations.
Placement
Theorist of early Romanticism: romantic poetry is “progressive universal poetry”, irony the freedom of the mind above its own works.
Key ideas
- Romantic irony
- Progressive universal poetry
- The fragment
Influence
Influenced by 3
Immanuel Kant
influenced by
In his Essay on the Concept of Republicanism (1796) Schlegel took up Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace (1795) but argued, against Kant, that republicanism is necessarily democratic. F. Schlegel, Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus (1796); I. Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795); SEP “Friedrich Schlegel”
Evidence: AI draft
Immanuel Kant › 1724–1804
Johann Gottfried Herder
influenced by
Schlegel reviewed the seventh and eighth collections of Herder’s Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1796), engaging with Herder’s historical view of ancient and modern poetry. F. Schlegel, review of J. G. Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, seventh and eighth collections (1796), in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe II; SEP “Friedrich Schlegel”
Evidence: AI draft
Johann Gottfried Herder › 1744–1803
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
influenced by
Schlegel counted Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, with the French Revolution and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, among the great ‘tendencies of the age’ (Athenaeum, 1798) and based his irony on Fichtean self-reflection. F. Schlegel, Athenaeum fragments (1798); SEP “Friedrich Schlegel”
Evidence: AI draft
Johann Gottlieb Fichte › 1762–1814
Influenced 1
Novalis
influenced
Novalis developed his fragments in ‘symphilosophy’ with Friedrich Schlegel, who published Pollen (1798) in the Athenaeum, and took up Schlegel’s programme of a romantic poetry. Novalis, Blüthenstaub, in Athenaeum I (1798); F. Schlegel, Athenaeum fragments (1798); SEP “Novalis”
Evidence: AI draft
Novalis › 1772–1801
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Søren Kierkegaard
criticised by
In The Concept of Irony (1841) Kierkegaard criticised Schlegel’s romantic irony, exemplified by Lucinde, as an infinite negativity that dissolves ethical actuality into aesthetic play. S. Kierkegaard, Om Begrebet Ironi (1841), Part Two, on Friedrich Schlegel; SEP “Søren Kierkegaard”
Evidence: AI draft
Søren Kierkegaard › 1813–1855
Works
Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry – and a fragment must be complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Position
Schlegel was the leading theorist of early German Romanticism. Romantic poetry, he wrote, is a “progressive universal poetry”: always becoming and never complete, it mixes genres and joins poetry with philosophy and criticism. Its key attitude is irony – the mind’s power to create while rising above its own creations, aware that no finite work can contain the infinite. Hence his preference for the fragment, a thought that is both complete and open. Later he turned to Sanskrit and the culture of India, helping to found comparative linguistics, and to a Catholic philosophy of history. His ideas on irony and interpretation reach through Kierkegaard to modern literary theory.
Life & context
Friedrich Schlegel was born in Hanover in 1772, the son of a pastor, and turned from law to the study of classical antiquity. In Jena and Berlin he formed the early Romantic circle with his brother August Wilhelm, Novalis, Tieck and Schleiermacher, and with his brother edited the journal Athenaeum. In 1808 he converted to Catholicism and entered Austrian service in Vienna. He died in Dresden in 1829.
Further main works
- On the Study of Greek Poetry (1797)
- Critical (Lyceum) Fragments (1797)
- Dialogue on Poetry (1800)
- On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808)
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