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.

Quote Details

Topic	Poetry
Source	Help us find the source

More Quotes by Karl Add to List

About the Author

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

69 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"Science is not addressed to poets"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

George Henry Lewes

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite"

Paul Dirac, Physicist

"Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem"

Paul Nurse, Scientist

"A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have"

Wallace Stevens, Poet

Wallace Stevens

"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense"

Thomas Harrison, Writer

"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist"

Vladimir Nabokov, Novelist

"What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude"

Harold Bloom, Critic

Harold Bloom

"Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools"

John Barton, Poet

John Barton

"I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance"

John Barton, Poet

John Barton

"I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness"

Wilfred Owen, Soldier

Wilfred Owen

"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong"

George Meredith, Novelist

George Meredith

"It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)"

James Schuyler, Poet

"Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know"

Joseph Roux, Clergyman

"In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem"

Allen Tate, Poet

"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production"

Joseph Brodsky, Poet

"A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances"

Douglas Dunn, Poet

"There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired"

Edward Young, Poet

Edward Young

"It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape"

Mark Strand, Poet

"A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away"

Ivan Turgenev, Novelist