Formalism seems a classical obsession, but Angela Leighton argues in her recent On Form that the key moment came with romanticism. Schiller said that in a beautiful poem “the content should do nothing, the form everything . . . . the real artistic secret of the master consists in his annihilating the material by means of the form.” Coleridge found that Shakespeare’s characters are “ideal: they are not the things but the abstracts of the things which a great mind may take into itself and naturalize to its own heaven.”
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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