Marriage Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel’s barb lands on the phrase “so-called” like a raised eyebrow: he’s not praising marriage, he’s interrogating the kind of happiness polite society likes to certify. The comparison is surgical. A “correct poem” suggests craft, rule, polish, the approved forms that signal competence. An “improvised song” suggests risk, heat, contingency, the living voice making itself up in real time. By mapping marriage onto the poem and love onto the improvised song, Schlegel isn’t saying poems are bad; he’s saying correctness is the wrong standard for measuring what love does.

The intent is Romantic, but not syrupy. Early German Romanticism bristled at Enlightenment neatness: the era’s obsession with order, classification, and social legibility. Schlegel’s jab implies that the bourgeois ideal of a stable, “happy” marriage is a public artifact, a product you can display and grade. Love, in his framing, is private voltage - messy, renewable, and a little dangerous because it can’t be fully institutionalized without losing its essential motion.

The subtext is that marriage often rewards performance. You can do it “right” and still miss the point, the way a technically flawless poem can feel dead on the page. Meanwhile, an improvised song can be uneven, even mistaken, yet truer to the moment that produced it. Schlegel’s deeper provocation isn’t anti-commitment; it’s anti-compliance: a warning that when intimacy becomes a finished text, it stops sounding like a human voice.