Poetry and Philosophy in Romanticism: Notes about Hölderlin and Friedrich Schlegel

Abstract

These Sketchs, Skizzen have the purpose to clarify the romantic concept of poetry starting from a Kantian text on the creative work of the genius (KU, 49), establishing the free play of imagination and reason that illuminates aesthetical ideas. In the creative dialogue between genius and nature we analize the romantic ideal of truth/beauty, expressed in Heraclitus’ sentence: “hen diapheron eauto” reassumed by Hölderlin, which serves as starting point to deduce the concepts of symbol and mith, and the romantic effort to search for mithology of reason=freedom or modern subjectivity. On this basis, we comment Friedrich Schlegel’s programme of a transcendental, universal and progressive poetry (Lyc, 115 y Ath., 116), like an infinite movement of selfreflection on the image, in analogical reply to the Kantian/Fichtean transcendental idealism. The aim is to find a metagender or originary gender for all literary genders, able to put all
of them in a productive interrelation. For Schlegel, such a metagender is modern novel as both an image of a subjective history and a mirror of the world, where narrative, rethorical discourse, sayings, aphorism social and political critic combine and live together. Lastly, we analize F. Schlegel ‘s proposal of a conjunction between poetry and philosophy as open totalities with different directions, reciprocally complementary, which differ in  their original starting point.