On Simple and Sentimental Poetry

Friedrich Schiller
38 pages (2007/1795); 182KB download
WOWIO Books; ISBN: WOWIO-00331

DESCRIPTION

This essay constructs the ideal of the perfect poet, contrasting between the simple and the sentimental; it draws reference to Homer and provides large historical and aesthetic generalizations.

"The sentimental poetry is the fruit of quiet and retirement; simple poetry the child of life. One is a favor of nature; the sentimental depends on itself, the simple on the world of experience. The sentimental is in danger of extending the limits of human nature too far, of being too ideal, too mystical. Neither character exhausts the ideal of humanity, but the intimate union of both. Both are founded in human nature; the contradictions lying at their basis, when cleared in thought from the poetical faculty, are realism and idealism. These also are sides of human nature, which, when unconnected, bring forth disastrous results. Their opposition is as old as the beginning of culture, and till its end can hardly be set aside, save in the individual. The idealist is a nobler but a far less perfect being; the realist appears far less noble, but is more perfect, for the noble lies in the proof of a great capacity, but the perfect in the general attitude of the whole and in the real facts."
- Editor's introduction, 1875 edition of Schiller's "Essays, Aesthetical and Philosophical"