Introduction

     Schlegel is the leading German Romantic theorist. He was the editor of the periodical Anthenaeum(1798-1800). They published a variety of thoughts literary, morals philosophical, political and other critical fragments. In Schlegel's critical essays, we find a sense of Romantic ideas. These ideas are the initial expression of Romanticism.

     In the essay, Schlegel gives attention to wit and irony on poetry. Wit, he says is identifiable with genius, and it is an inventive power. Irony has a dialectical relationship with wit. Irony opposes wit. Irony can be characterized as both a divine breath and a transcendental buffoonery rising above its own art, virtue and genius.

Critical Fragments

     Here he says that there is the lack of irony in Greek art. Wit is dominant there, which is derived from absolute social feeling and fragmentary genius. Schlegel counts the role of imagination in writing poetry because writing poetry does not mean imitating the nature. Imagination if combined with imitation, the poet creates good art.

     There is therefore the paramount role of subject (mind). The idea is that if you are writing a poem, about Luxemburg by merely copying whatever is there, you do not produce a good poem. You need to combine imagination with imitation. This is the romantic idea of poetry.

     Wit is a logical sociability. Not the art and works of art make someone artist but the feeling, inspiration and impulse make him/ her artist.So, every honest writer writes for nobody. The role of poet is not to educate and delight readers. This role can be given to the critic only. Our confined spirit finds an outlet which we call wit.

     Romantic poetry is progressive and universal. Irony is the interplay of two conflicting thoughts. There is always an unbridgeable gap between art and raw beauty.

     Raw beauty needs imaginative treatment to be the art. So, beauty is a psychological phenomenon. He quotes Voltaire's dictum that “all genres are good except one that is boring". He also talks of harmony, which is the Universality (i.e. the successive satiation of all forms and substances: a romantic idea again.

William Wordsworth      William Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads" is a major expression of the spirit of English Romanticism. This present essay simply shifts emphasis from the relationship between poem and reader to that between poet and poem. But it does not mean that Wordsworth gives up the concern for his reader. He is deep interested in speaking to the reader by the moral effect of his work. Nevertheless, he defines the poem primarily in term of its author's creative activity. He approaches the idea of poem after discussing the idea of poet. In this sense, a poet is a man who speaks to men; he has great knowledge of human nature, and a mass comprehensive soul. It is true that a poet is endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness. Read More...

Samuel T. Coleridge     The essay is a tribute to Shakespeare who possesses all the qualities and conditions of a true poet. Coleridge tries to unveil some misconceptions popular about Shakespeare by formulating some romantic conceptions. He is a genius who well expressed himself in his dramas and poems. The ideas that he was immoral are totally groundless.The organic form he exposes is true to his genius for it is innate that shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its devolvement is one and the some with the perfection of its outward form.Shakespeare himself is nature... Read More...

P.B. Shelley      P. B. Shelley, a great Romantic poet and critic, defends poetry by claiming that the poet creates human values and imagines the forms that shape the social and cultural order. Read More...

Charles Baudelaire      Baudelaire is a French Romanticist and the precursor of symbolic movement in European literature. He considers imagination as the “queen of faculties”, truly creative power. The imagination must shape what nature makes.... Read More...

John Keats      Last Poet of a Romantic period, John Keats' critical speculation is found in his letters, which he wrote to different persons in different walks of life. He believes in sensation rather than thought. Later he is also known as sensuous poet. He is sensuous poet because he makes use of that poetic image, which directly affects... Read More...

Edward Young      Conjectures on Original Composition primarily attack the subject. Young distinguishes' originals' from 'imitations' the former far better than the latter despite the former is fewer in number. Read More...

Friedrich Von Schelling     Schelling is a German-Idealist, in the post Kantian development in German philosophy. He rejects Kant’s idea that' things in themselves' are unknown. Instead he posited a subject and object that are joined in aesthetic activity. This joining is a creative act. Man's creativity is analogous to the unconscious creativity of nature. Read More...