 Schlegel does seem to acknowledge at times that his claims for the romantic border on the overly expansive (or, some would prefer, on the inherently incomplete or uncompletable). In a 1793 letter to his brother, he said: “I cannot send you my explanation of the word ‘romantic’ because it would be 125 sheets long” (cited in Beiser, 1992, 410, n 67). Schlegel’s bold envisioning of the romantic and the Roman are, however, part of a larger project in poetics and aesthetics concerned with finding a standard of judgment appropriate to the individuality of artistic and literary works.