Abstract

While working on Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller was already devising and drafting an essay that derived a special theory of poetry and literature from the principles of his general aesthetics. He would go on to present this literary theory to the public in three parts in Die Horen, in November and December 1795 and January 1796, respectively. In 1800, he published a slightly modified version of the essay in its entirety under the title On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. In this text, Schiller offers a literary theory that, on the basis of a theoretical and practical anthropology, enables historical differentiations and literary-theoretical specifications that allow for literary-critical judgments. In doing so—as in On Grace and Dignity and the Aesthetic Letters—he uses Kantian terminology to elaborate what is ultimately an anti-Kantian poetics insofar as it claims to be able to grasp and judge literature by bringing it under concepts.