About naive and sentimental poetry

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About naive and sentimental poetry is a poetry-theoretical treatise by Friedrich Schiller from 1795. In it Schiller describes different types of poetic relationship to the world.

The writing is embedded in a philosophy of history (nature - culture - ideal) and cultural criticism . The present, the stage of culture , is presented as critical and worth conquering. As in the Aesthetic Letters, Schiller's considerations revolve around the question of whether there is any potential in art to overcome the loss of holism and the inevitability of the present age. Schiller calls the desired state “ ideal ”. The instances in which it is presented are “nature” in the form of the “ naive ” and “sentimental” poetry.

As the writing progresses, it becomes clear that the naive cannot be repeated in the present - actually it is itself a projection of the sentimental consciousness - on the other hand, sentimental poetry ultimately cannot succeed under the difficult conditions of the present. This applies to all three subspecies of sentimental poetry - satire , elegy, and idyll . Even the idyll, which could provide the "glimpse" of the ideal, fails because in its concrete representation "reality with its barriers and culture with its artificiality" comes to light. It cannot cancel the discrepancy between ideal and reality, it can only reproduce it.

example

The naive poet, such as Homer , according to Schiller, like the child and the ancient man in general, is " at one with himself and happy in the feeling of his humanity" ; on the other hand, "we" - modern people and sentimental poets - are "at odds with ourselves and unhappy in our experiences of humanity . " Our feeling

[...] is not what the ancients had; rather, it is all the same with what we have for the ancients. You felt natural; we feel the natural. There was no doubt a very different feeling that filled Homer's soul when he let his divine pig shepherd entertain Ulysses than what moved the soul of young Werther when he read this song after a troublesome company. Our feeling for nature is like the sick person's feeling for health.

Work in full text

literature

  • Peter Szondi: The naive is the sentimental. On the dialectic of terms in Schiller's treatise. In: Euphorion 66 (1972), pp. 174-206; also:
  • Helmut Koopmann : About naive and sentimental poetry. In: Schiller manual. Edited by Helmut Koopmann. Stuttgart 1998, pp. 627-638.