ABSTRACT
The bewildering variety of definitions and meanings and the sense of dissatisfaction with them have long given rise to complaint. This discouraging view would seem to be confirmed by the incongruous assortment of definitions that have been evolved in the last hundred and fifty years. The confusion has become so great that a separate sub-species has arisen which seeks to review the existent definitions and as far as possible to categorize them: those that distinguish primarily between 'romantic' and 'classical', those that oppose 'romantic' to 'realistic', those that separate 'intrinsic' from 'historic' Romanticism, those formulated by the pro-Romantics and those of the anti-Romantics, etc. For practical purposes, however, it proves more helpful to recognize the difference between those definitions that are of an inclusive nature and those, on the contrary, that tend to the restrictive. No one was more erratic in this than brilliant but mercurial Friedrich Schlegel, who is usually held responsible for introducing word into the literary context.
