August Wilhelm von Schlegel Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ernst Behler

Critical Essay by Ernst Behler

SOURCE: Behler, Ernst. “Lyric Poetry in the Early Romantic Theory of the Schlegel Brothers.” In Romantic Poetry, edited by Angela Esterhammer, pp. 115-41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002.

In the following excerpt, Behler studies Schlegel's ideas regarding the mythic origins and the formal, metrical, and aesthetic features of lyric poetry.

Considering the prominent rank of lyric poetry in European Romantic literature, we would expect an equally important position of the lyric genre in the thought of the Romantic critics about poetry. Indeed, this expectation is met by rich and diversified reflections on the nature of the lyric in essays, letters, fragments, and conversational pieces by the Romantics. These texts testify to their awareness of the revolution they accomplished in this genre perhaps more decisively than in any other. Yet these diversified reflections hardly congeal into anything like a theory of Romantic lyric poetry and cannot easily be synthesized through...
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