ABSTRACT
it is curious that we should return, after two hundred years, to a discussion of the problem that Lessing made the subject of his Laokoon. To read that essay now is to plunge into a philosophical sea in which all our values sail upside down. Lessing set out to separate the spheres of painting and poetry. The false criticism of his time, he felt, had confused the categories. “It has produced the love of description in poetry, and of allegory in painting: while the critics strove to reduce poetry to a speaking painting, without properly knowing what it could and ought to paint; and painting to a dumb poem, without having considered in what degree it could express general ideas, without alienating itself from its destiny, and degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.”
