SOURCE: Goslee, Nancy M. “Plastic to Picturesque: Schlegel's Analogy and Keats's Hyperion Poems.” Keats-Shelley Journal 30 (1981): 118-51.

In the following excerpt, Goslee considers the insight that Schlegel's A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature provides into the poetry of John Keats.

In a series of lectures on literature from 1811 through 1818, Coleridge drew upon the attempts of Schiller, Schelling, and most extensively A. W. Schlegel to define the relationship of ancient to modern culture through analogy to the plastic and visual arts. “The spirit of ancient art and poetry is plastic, and that of the moderns picturesque,” Schlegel declares in John Black's 1815 translation of his lectures.¹ In an 1811 lecture on Shakespeare, Coleridge, too, virtually translates Schlegel: “The Shakespearean drama and the Greek drama may be compared to statuary and painting. In statuary, as in the Greek drama, the characters must be few, because the very essence of statuary...