The naive and the sentimental: is modern poetic consciousness condemned to reflective alienation, or does the sentimental achieve something the naive could not?

Friedrich Schiller, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The naive is the ancient form — the poet who is nature, who represents directly without consciousness of the gap between subject and object. The sentimental is the modern form — the poet who seeks nature, who feels the gap between real and ideal as the very source of his art. Modernity has not condemned poetry to alienation; modernity has discovered the kind of poetry the moderns can write.

The sentimental idyll — in which the real and the ideal would be reunited not by recovery of the lost Greek harmony but by creation of a future harmony adequate to historical reflection — is the regulative goal.¹²³⁴

Sources

1. In modern times, indeed, even in the most recent times we also have naive poetry in all classes even if no longer of a completely pure sort. Among the ancient Latin poets and in fact even among the ancient Greek poets there is no shortage of sentimental poets.

   Essays

2. However, Schiller adds, the goals in each case, namely, the goals "reached for through culture" and those "achieved through nature," are quite different. From this comparison he concludes that the idealist goal of modern humanity is "immensely preferable" to the realist goal of the more natural humanity in antiquity.

   Essays

3. The critics, the real border patrol of taste, detest these naive poets for disrupting the boundaries and would rather see them suppressed. That even Ho- mer is granted some validity by these judges of taste might be traced simply to the force of more than a thousand years of testimony.

   Essays

4. Sentimental poetry is distinguished from the naive by the fact that it relates the actual condition to ideas and applies the ideas to actuality, while the naive remains at the actual condition. Thus, as has already been mentioned above, it always has to do with two competing objects at the same time, namely, with the ideal and with experience.

   Essays

Where the argument is made

• Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795-96)
• the Bürger review (Über Bürgers Gedichte, 1791) and the Matthisson review (1794) as anticipations
• Aesthetic Letters Letter 6 on modern fragmentation
• the Goethe correspondence around the August 1794 birthday letter mapping speculative vs intuitive intellect
• the Briefe über Don Carlos (1788) on Posa's idealism

How the argument was received

Held with an awareness the text itself thematizes — that I am the sentimental treating sentimental subjects, know it, and find in this self-knowledge no reason for shame. The historical irrecoverability of the naive is not lamented as a fall; it is acknowledged as the condition that makes modern poetry, including the present essay, possible.