Friedrich Schlegel attached great importance to reflecting on poetry and recorded his thoughts in numerous notebooks. He had published many of his ideas in the journal Athenaeum, edited by himself and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel.

The central idea was: “Romantic poetry is progressive, universal poetry” — that is, a literature uniting all genres and areas of knowledge and in a state of constant further development. Numerous scientists have studied Schlegel’s innovative ideas — you can hear a number of their comments in the video installation.

In June 1802, Schlegel and his family moved to Paris, where he put out a journal entitled Europa. The first issue appeared in early 1803 and contained a contribution on the state of the sciences and the arts in a time of great upheavals. Germany’s intellectual developments appeared to Schlegel to be trailblazing: in his words, they manifested the “universal reciprocity of all the arts and sciences”, within which context the “poetry” held a special status.

The document on view in this display asks “Would it not be more correct to place π [poetry] at the centre?”, which he accordingly answers in the affirmative. The sketch illustrates poetry’s prominent position. It is in the middle; the other terms revolve around it. They are, in a clockwise direction: politics, criticism, aesthetics, physics, religion, mathematics, and philosophy. Schlegel comments: “Poetry is the sun in which all the planets of the arts and sciences dissolve.” In his definition, poetry encompasses far more than just literature; he regards it as a universal creative principle that overcomes every boundary.