3 - The theory of Romantic poetry

Summary

With his move to Jena in August 1796, Friedrich Schlegel's interests came to focus more and more on modern and contemporary literature, as well as on the philosophy of his time. He was still working on his History of the Poetry of the Greeks and the Romans and spent part of the winter with F. A. Wolf in Halle to bring the initial sections of this work into their final shape. Yet, after the first volume appeared in 1798, he actually abandoned this project, which had served as the starting-point for his search into the nature of poetry. Instead he composed the grand essays of these years (1796–8), intense studies of Jacobi, Forster, Lessing, and Goethe (KFSA 2, 57–146). Their common theme can be described as a particular type of writing that has left behind the habitual distinctions between poetry and prose, science and art, literature and philosophy. The writers discussed, all great literary authors themselves, were equally prominent in philosophy and the theoretical discussion of issues of the modern world. Although strongly bound in their mode of expression to drama, lyric poetry, the novel, or the philosophical treatise, they represent in large sections of their literary production what Schlegel at that time considered the modern bourgeois prose writer. Since their mode of viewing the world was no longer the absolute understanding of the traditional philosopher nor the holistic manner of the older poets, nothing appeared to be more appropriate than to expound their ideas and their art of writing in the form of the essay, and thereby initiating a genre projected in Friedrich Schlegel's notebooks as the new ‘German essay’ (KFSA 18, 219).