SCHELLING'S POETRY

6overboard. I have still seen nothing more than thirteen stanzas which he wrote atChristmas for Caroline (with whom he gets on very well indeed) as an announcementof his work. 10Dante was, of course, already a crucial figure in the Romantic pantheon. A.W. Schlegel hadbeen theorizing and translating the Divine Comedy since at least 1791; Dante symbolized,alongside Cervantes and Shakespeare, the possibilities for art in a post-Classical age. 11Likewise, Dante would be central to Schelling’s thinking about aesthetics and poetic creationfor the next few years. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, given in Jena during theWinter Semester of 1802/3 and then again at the University of Würzburg in the WinterSemester of 1803/4, Schelling gives Dante pride of place. He writes,[The Divine Comedy] is the most universal representative of modern poesy not as thisindividual poem . . . but rather [as] the poem of all poems, the poesy of modern poesyitself. This is the reason why I made the Divine Comedy of Dante the object ofspecial presentation and do not subsume it under any other genre, but construe itrather as a genre in and for itself. (5:687; 239)Moreover, while the rest of Schelling’s analysis of art in his Lectures languished unpublisheduntil his death, he ensured that his discussion of Dante was published in 1802 in the KritischeJournal der Philosophie under the title, ‘Dante in Relation to Philosophy’. I will return to the10 G.L. Plitt, Aus Schellings Leben in Briefen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1869), 1:289; partially translated in Robert J.Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: U ofChicago P, 2002), 160.11 See, for example, Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, §247 in Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. PeterFirchow (Minneapolis: Uo Minnesota P, 1971), 197.