Time & Perspective Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel slips a razor into the polite parlor game of defining art. His point isn’t that definitions are hard; it’s that they’re inherently prescriptive. The moment you try to pin poetry down in a tidy formula, you stop describing a living practice and start issuing a rulebook for what counts. Definition becomes legislation.

The slyness is in how he frames the alternative: if you want a definition that captures what poetry actually has been, the only honest one is laughably circular - “poetry is whatever people, somewhere, once called poetry.” It’s a deliberately deflating punchline, but it’s also a serious Romantic move. Schlegel is writing in an era when “poetry” is expanding beyond inherited classical models: folk songs, fragments, lyric subjectivity, experiments that look messy next to neoclassical ideals. A fixed definition would smuggle in someone’s taste - usually the gatekeeper’s - and erase the unruly evidence.

Subtext: the fight over poetry is really a fight over cultural authority. Who gets to name things? Critics, academies, educated elites? Or communities and readers over time? Schlegel effectively shifts the ground from essence to history, from “what poetry is” to “how poetry becomes recognized.” The line anticipates modern arguments about genre and canon: categories don’t merely reflect art; they shape it, reward certain forms, and make others invisible.

He’s not surrendering to “anything goes” so much as demanding intellectual honesty. If poetry is a moving target, that’s not a weakness; it’s the record of changing sensibilities, institutions, and power.