Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829)

• leading theorist of German Romanticism
• Lyceum Fragments, Lyceum der schönen Kunste (1797)
• editor of Athenaeum (1798-1800)
• wit ("genius and inventive power") and irony ("skeptical perspective")
• irony permits movement to higher level
• object of knowledge remains unattainable

Lyceum Fragments (1797)

• "assumption that poetry is infinitely valuable"
• "a poem is only a product of nature which wants to become a work of art"
• "every good poem must be wholly intentional and wholly instinctive. That is how it becomes ideal"
• "to express an idea with due circumspection, one must have relegated it wholly to one's past; one must no longer be preoccupied with it"
• "the value and the dignity of self-restriction"; "wherever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the world; and that makes one a slave"; "one can only restrict oneself at those points where one possesses infinite power"
• "Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great"
• "the artist wants to ennoble and instruct"
• "wit is its own end, like virtue, like love and art"
• "feeling and inspiration and impulse"
• "every honest author writes for nobody or everybody"
• "wit is an explosion of confined spirit"
• Socratic irony: "deliberate dissimulation"
• "everything should be playful and serious"
• "only by means of the sharpest focus on a single point can the individual idea gain a kind of wholeness"
• "the synthetic writer constructs and creates a reader as he should be"
• "all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one"
• "absolute tolerance with absolute rigor"

Athenaeum Fragments (1798-1800)

• Romantic poetry: progressive, universal, "to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric"
• "an image of the age"
• "state of becoming", infinite, free
• "all poetry is or should be romantic"
• "an idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony"
• "even the vagaries of poetry have their value as raw materials and preliminaries for universality"
• independence of beauty, "distinct from truth and morality"
• convergence of poetry, science and philosophy
• "the usual classifications of poetry are mere dead pedantry designed for people with limited vision
• "the life of the Universal Spirit is an unbroken chain of inner revolutions"

On Incomprehensibility (1800)

• "coarse irony" "to be found in the real nature of things"; "in the history of mankind"
• irony of irony: "if irony turns into a mannerism and becomes, as it were, ironical about the author"; "if irony runs wild and can't be controlled any longer"
• Shakespeare "much more full of intentions than people usually think"