Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

"Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science"

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Poet

About this Quote

Schlegel’s jab lands because it’s aimed at a fashionable confusion: the urge to force the prestige of science onto art, and the aura of art onto science, as if swapping costumes could erase the difference in what each mode of thought is for. “Strictly speaking” is the little scalpel here. He’s not denying that poems can mention atoms or that scientists can write beautifully. He’s policing categories at the moment they’re being aggressively blurred, warning that the hybrid often collapses into parody: verse that reads like a textbook, or “poetic” science that substitutes mood for method.

The symmetry of the line is the point. “Scientific poem” and “poetic science” are built as mirror images, and Schlegel’s punchline is that both mirrors distort. Science, in the modern sense taking shape around him, earns authority through replicable procedures and disciplined doubt; poetry earns its power through ambiguity, compression, and the licensed leap. When each tries to borrow the other’s core credential, it risks becoming kitsch: science dressed up as mysticism, poetry dressed up as data.

Context matters. Early German Romanticism didn’t just celebrate feeling; it also theorized art’s autonomy against Enlightenment rationalism. Schlegel, a poet-critic with a talent for epigram, is staking out a boundary that protects poetry’s freedom from becoming a didactic instrument. Subtext: don’t confuse information with insight, or technique with truth. His cynicism isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-category error.

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Topic	Poetry
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Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (March 10, 1772 - January 12, 1829) was a Poet from Germany.

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