Romantic Art and Philosophic Idealism. The Conjugation of Religious and Philosophic Experience in the Poetic Image of the World in German Romantic Ballades

Abstract

A figure in which German romanticism unites the religious and philosophical cognition of the world is a poet. He who is the prophet, priest and the thinking being, converts his intuitive and sentimental cognition into a poetic creation, the only possible construction of the wholeness which, presenting the order of things within individual space, is the witness of the world order as it is. One of the most popular genres of Romanticism, the artistic ballad,  being a reflective and self-reflective type of poetry, both demonstrates and artistically effectively presents the process of simultaneity of cognition and creation  by using literary devices which create a distance between the topic and speech instance, that is, by means of simple narrative matrix and the tone of folk poetry, change of speech instances, by problematizing the status of the real or shifting of what is presented to fairytale spheres. This paper tends to show it by taking theoretical postulates of Romantic poetry by Friedrich Schlegel and perception of ballad by Hartmut Laufhite as starting points, and using the examples of representative ballads by Novalis, Tieck and Brentano with the topic of poet and his position in the world.