9 - The later poetry

Summary

Schiller's return to creative writing began with a return to poetry. After ‘Die Künstler’ he wrote almost no poems for some six years, but by 1795, when his major treatise on aesthetics, the Ästhetische Briefe, was behind him and he was actively considering the different kinds of poetic consciousness and ‘modes of feeling’ in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, he was ready to ease himself again into poetic production. He had written to Korner in 1794 that his treatise on the naive, as he envisaged it at that time, would be ‘a kind of bridge to poetic production’, and certainly in the final essay, particularly in the discussion of the major poets of the age, one senses someone itching to complement criticism with creative work. One of the first poems to be written in 1795, ‘Die Macht des Gesanges’ (‘The Power of Song’), shares a key image with Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, begun later that year. That is the image, discussed at the beginning of the previous chapter, of modern man as the prodigal, longing for a distant home.