ABSTRACT
Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. It is destined not merely to reunite the separate genres of poetry and to link poetry to philosophy and rhetoric. It embraces all that is poetic, from the greatest art system that enfolds further systems, down to the sigh, the kiss uttered in artless song by the child creating its own poetry. Romantic poetry is still in the process of becoming; this indeed is its very essence that it is eternally evolving, never completed. It cannot be exhausted by any theory, and only a divinatory criticism could dare to try to characterize its ideal. Romantic poetry is in fact the very art of poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic. Transcendental poetry begins as satire with the absolute distinction between ideal and real, is poised between the two in elegy, and finally achieves complete identity of the two in the idyll.
