SCHLEGEL, AUGUST WILHELM VON. – German critic, philologist, and poet, b. in Hannover on 5 November 1767, d. in Bonn on 12 May 1845.
He first studied theology at Gottinga, but soon abandoned it for literature. From 1795 he was in Jena (where he became a professor in 1798), collaborating on Schiller’s Horen and Musenalmanach with his first poetic translations and several essays on the relationship between form and content in poetry (Briefe über Poesie, Silbenmass u. Sprache); then, together with his brother Friedrich, he founded the journal Athenaeum (Berlin 1798–1800), in which he conducted a demolishing critique of the fashionable Frenchified literature. In 1801 he delivered in Berlin the Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur u. Kunst – a polemic against the Enlightenment and a revaluation of medieval poetry – attracting around himself a group of young Romantic poets. He revealed genuine talent in translating poetic works: 17 Shakespearean plays (1797–1810), 5 plays by Calderón (Spanisches Theater, 1803–1809), other Romance poetry (Blumensträusse italienischer, spanischer u. portugiesischer Poesie, Berlin 1904), and, in part, Dante. After 1804 he travelled through Europe with M.me de Staël, turning his interest also toward the visual arts (hence, later, the Vorlesungen
über Theorie u. Geschichte der bildenden Künste, Berlin 1827), and stayed with her in the famous villa at Coppet, the centre of the new European culture. He participated in Staël’s attempt to acquaint the French with the new phase of the life of the German spirit by combating the invasion of French classicism (Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide, 1807). In Vienna in 1808 he delivered those Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst u. Literatur (Heidelberg 1808–11), in which he codified the concept of «romantic art» (the art of nostalgia, yearning for God and for the mystery of the Universe; the union of life and death, of sensuality and spirituality), that is, the art of Shakespeare and the Spaniards, and contrasted it with that of «classical art» (the art of possession and serene joy, the harmonious legislation of the world, sharing in the autonomous perfection of nature), the art of the Greeks, Romans, French, and Italians; this division opened the way to the literary disputes of the early nineteenth century. After 1818 he was at the University of Bonn and, as the first professor of Sanskrit in Germany, introduced the scientific study of this literature through the journal Indische Bibliothek (1823–30) and through the editing and publication of Indian works. In Berichtigung einiger Missendungen (1827) he expressed his aversion to Catholicism. His final writings, especially the Musenallmanach of Wendt (1832), are violent satires against former Romantic companions, Schiller, Goethe, and his own brother Friedrich. His poetic production was mediocre (Gedichte, 1800; Poetische Werke, 1811; the drama Jon [1803], based on models by Euripides). A spirit more imitative than creative, but one who knew how to penetrate into the innermost being of other poets, he made valuable critical contributions and pointed out new paths in the field of aesthetics. He carried his opposition to the eighteenth century too far, however, losing sight of nature in order to adhere to the Fichtean concept of the work of art as the exclusive emanation of the subjective Self.
BIBL. ed.: the only complete one is the old edition by Ed. Böcking (12 vols., Lipsia 1846–47). Studies: O. Wassermeier, Die Kunstlehre A. W. S.'s und ihr Verhältnis zu Kunst und Schillers Ästhetik, ibid. 1923; Comtesse J. de Pange, A. G. S. et Mme de Staël d'après des documents inédits, Parigi 1938; B. V. BRENTANO, FRANZ, A. W. S., Stoccarda 1943. Alba Cori