Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel isn’t merely defending Homer and company; he’s diagnosing a failure of nerve in modern criticism. The jab is technical as much as philosophical: “Nothing truly convincing” hasn’t been written because the attempts lack “thoroughness, vigor, and skill” - the same virtues the ancients supposedly exemplify. It’s a dare disguised as a verdict. If you’re going to topple a canon, you’d better write with the force of the canon.

The subtext is Romantic-era anxiety: Europe at the turn of the 19th century is obsessed with declaring independence from classical models while still measuring itself against them. Schlegel, a key Romantic theorist, is caught in that tension. He’s not saying the ancients are untouchable; he’s saying modernity hasn’t earned the right to dismiss them. “As yet” matters. It leaves the door cracked for a future critique that could match antiquity’s scale - but implies most contemporary polemics are thin, reactive, and rhetorically underpowered.

The emphasis on poetry is strategic. Poetry is where the ancients feel most “unanswerable” because it resists being argued down the way a political system or moral code might. You can refute Plato; you don’t “disprove” Sophocles. Schlegel’s line also flatters poetry as the highest test of cultural competence: if your counterargument can’t even meet the aesthetic bar, it’s not a serious historical claim.

In a period busy inventing the modern, Schlegel warns that rebellion without mastery is just provincialism wearing a new hat.