Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature by Simon Critchley

Author:Simon Critchley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Romantic poetry is progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; to make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical.

So far, so good. Such claims for aesthetic absolutism are already familiar to us from what I said above. However, Schlegel continues:

Other kinds of poetry are finished and are now capable of being fully analyzed. The romantic kind of poetry is still in the process of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare to try and characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself. The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.

(AF 116)

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