The “Poetical Poetics” of Friedrich Schlegel

Abstract

The creation of a “poetical poetics” was one of the personal postulates of Friedrich Schlegel that never achieved full execution. The Romantic thinker’s fragmentary thought, sparkling with paradoxes, does not easily submit to synthesis. The purpose of this article is to present the poetological reflections of the author of Fragments as a constellation of concepts interconnected non-systematically, which in a historical sense represent an indirect response to the normative poetics of classicism. The theoretical reflection of the Jena Romantics, in accordance with the spirit of “progressive poetry,” adopted a provocatively open form. Thoughts concerning literature itself (the ideal of the mixture-novel), like the language of description of that same literature (the ideal of a “pure poetics”), instead of striving to reach conclusions, manifest their own inconclusiveness. In defense of an open poetics, remaining in constant motion, stands “the freest of all licenses”, irony, which not only forms the subject of many of Schlegel’s fragments, but also functions as the very principle of their construction.