Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel is doing two things at once: indicting poetry for its misogyny, then quietly smuggling that misogyny back in through the definition of what counts as "feminine". The first sentence lands like a proto-feminist complaint. Poetry, he suggests, isn’t a sanctuary from social injustice; it’s a mirror that flatters men and distorts women. That’s a sharp Romantic-era tell: art prides itself on transcendence, yet keeps recycling the same power arrangements as the salon and the marriage market.

Then comes the trapdoor. "The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine" sounds like a neutral observation, but it’s a policing mechanism. Schlegel frames an impossible binary: women can be "feminine" (read: socially legible, compliant, embodied, domestic) or "idealistic" (aspirational, intellectual, morally elevated), but not both. It’s a complaint about poetic representation that doubles as a theory of female nature, and it tells you something about his moment. Early German Romanticism adored the Ideal - the sublime, the absolute - while simultaneously coding it as masculine terrain. Women get assigned to feeling and particularity; men get to own the universal.

The rhetorical trick is that it diagnoses injustice without challenging the underlying categories that produce it. If poetry fails women, it’s not because poets are trapped by lazy stereotypes; it’s because Schlegel treats "femininity" and "idealism" as mutually exclusive essences. The line’s bite comes from that contradiction: a critique that can’t quite imagine women as full citizens of the imagination.