On the Genesis and Meaning of Romanticism

by Arthur O. Lovejoy

We may, finally, observe both the similarity and the contrast between "sentimentalisch" and "romantisch" by recalling the terms in which Schlegel defined the latter in the celebrated Fragment 116 in the Athenaeum (1798) in which the adjective received, so to say, its first official definition. "Romantic poetry" is, first of all, a "progressive Poesie." It is "still in Becoming; indeed, this is its very essence, so that forever it can only become, and never be." In this, obviously, it resembles Schiller's "sentimental poetry." But Romantic poetry is also "Universalpoesie "—universal, be it noted, not in the sense of universality of appeal, but in the sense of totality, or all-inclusiveness of content, an all-inclusiveness which it can ever more nearly approximate but never attain. It must not only unite in itself the several forms and genres of poetry, but it must also "fill and cram every art-form with every sort of solid Bildungsstoff and animate the whole with the play of humor. It embraces everything whatsoever that is poetic, from the greatest system of art containing within itself other systems, to the sigh, the kiss which the child breathes forth as it improvises an artless song. . . . It alone can become a mirror of the whole surrounding world, a picture of the age." And yet it also, more than any other, can express the reflection of the poet upon the objects which he represents. "It alone is infinite, because it alone is free; and it accepts this as its first law, that the freedom (Willkuhr) of the poet shall suffer no law to be imposed upon it." "From the romantic standpoint," adds Schlegel in a later Fragment, "even the degenerate types of poetry—the eccentric and the monstrous—have their value as materials for and essays towards universality, if only there is really something in them, if they are original." 17,450 words, original print: 1916-1920

Contains parts 1 and 2 of two essays written by A. O. Lovejoy:

On the Meaning of 'Romantic' in Early German Romanticism (1916-1917)
Schiller and the Genesis of Romanticism (1920)

52 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 14, 2014

About the author

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an influential American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the field known as the history of ideas.

Lovejoy was born in Berlin, Germany while his father was doing medical research there. Eighteen months later, his mother committed suicide, whereupon his father gave up medicine and became a clergyman. Lovejoy studied philosophy, first at the University of California, then at Harvard under William James and Josiah Royce. In 1901, he resigned from his first job, at Stanford University, to protest the dismissal of a colleague who had offended a trustee. The President of Harvard then vetoed hiring Lovejoy on the grounds that he was a known troublemaker. Over the subsequent decade, he taught at Washington University, Columbia University, and the University of Missouri. He never married.

As a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1938, Lovejoy founded and long presided over that university's History of Ideas Club, where many prominent and budding intellectual and social historians, as well as literary critics, gathered. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas. Lovejoy insisted that the history of ideas should focus on "unit ideas," single concepts (often with a one-word name), and study how unit ideas combine and recombine with each other over time.

In the domain of epistemology, Lovejoy is remembered for an influential critique of the pragmatic movement, especially in the essay The Thirteen Pragmatisms, written in 1908.

Lovejoy was active in the public arena. He helped found the American Association of University Professors and the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. However, he qualified his belief in civil liberties to exclude overriding threats to a free system. At the height of the McCarthy Era (in the February 14, 1952 edition of the Journal of Philosophy) Lovejoy stated that, since it was a "matter of empirical fact" that membership in the Communist Party contributed "to the triumph of a world-wide organization" which was opposed to "freedom of inquiry, of opinion and of teaching," membership in the party constituted grounds for dismissal from academic positions. He also published numerous opinion pieces in the Baltimore press. He died in Baltimore on December 30, 1962.