ABSTRACT
OSCAR WILDE'S dictum that ‘Romantic Art begins with its climax' might be supported by the appearance of Novalis at the outset of the romantic age in Germany, since a great deal could be said for considering him the prototype of romantic poets, the nearest approach to a realization of Friedrich Schlegel’s visionary ideal of the romantic artist, the creator of an ideal world of his own : probably no poet persisted more stubbornly in the romantic mood, refusing to face reality, and taking refuge instead in a fanciful dream-existence. He was also highly poetic in his exquisite sensibility, reacting to the buffets of the world of physical reality with practically a caricature of hypersensitivity; he was a man possessed by art, as by a dangerous, debilitating sickness, very much in the sense in which Wackenroder’s literary self-portrait Berglinger, regards it: ‘Art is a seductive, forbidden fruit; whoever has once tasted its inmost, sweetest juice is irrevocably lost for the active world of everyday life.’ 1 The addiction of Novalis to art does go hand in hand with a morbid reversal of normal values, an insistence that death is the higher potential of life. In various ways then he does exhibit exaggeratedly ’ romantic' features : he is perhaps the most ‘romantic’ of them all (just as August Wilhelm Schlegel was the least ‘romantic’), because he is most escapist and most poetic— though not necessarily the greatest German romantic poet: Brentano or Eichendorff dispute that claim. And it was this most emphatically romantic poet who was also the first in time, and indeed the only poet of the pioneer Jena group.
