The Romantic Imperative - the Concept of Early German Romanticism

Poetry is in fact the general ideal of the Romantics, Frederick Beiser tells us, but only if poetry is understood not just narrowly as poems but more broadly as things made by humans. Seen in this way, poetry becomes a revolutionary ideal that demanded - and still demands - that we tranform not only literature and criticism but all the arts and sciences, that we break down the barriers between art and life, so that the world itself becomes "romanticised". Romanticism, in the view Beiser opens to us, does not conform to the contemporary division of labour in our universities and colleges; it requires a multifaceted approach of just the sort outlined here.