Early German Romanticism: Its Founders and Heinrich von Kleist

The following study is based on the convictions that the relation of Heinrich von Kleistand the German Romanticists to the German Classicists is not antipodal but resultant and complementary; that Classicism and Romanticism areorganic parts of the same cultural, philosophical,and poetic development; that early Romanticism is to be distinguished from later Romanticism; that Heinrich von Kleist, though he came into immediate contact only with later Romanticists, is to be numbered, by right of personal and poetic character as well as of historical position, with the originators of Romanticism; and that he approximately succeeded, where they had failed, in embodying their common ideals in poetic production