The Romantic Mimesis: Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and the Overcoming of the Principle of Imitation

Abstract

It is perhaps one of the main aesthetic proposals of the first German Romanticism (Frühromantik) the rejection of the principle of imitation (Nachahmungsprinzip). For the early romantics, poetry should not imitate nature, not because art is the opposite of nature –of which it is in some sense the
highest expression– but because poetry and art are not mere records of impressions but productive activities, which move from the inside out, and not
vice versa. The artist imitates nature but only as it constitutes a productive principle: he takes nature as a model in order to form (bilden), create as it
does. Therefore, the artist’s characteristic faculty is not imitative or reproductive, but productive, i.e. a Bildungskraft. Jena Romantics then do not reject
the notion of artistic mimesis, but claim for art a diametrically opposed place to the mere reproduction or copy process, that is, mimesis should be understood in the sense of poiesis. The following article will try to put into perspective some Novalis’ and Friedrich Schlegel’s fragmentary insights on
the problem of mimesis and the artist’s creative faculty, attending to the influence of Kant and Fichte in their analysis and to the rupture with other
nineteenth-century aesthetic conceptions.