 One of the most important expressions of Schlegel’s claims for the romantic can be found in the much-discussed Athenaeumsfragment 116: Romantic poetry is said there to be a “progressive, universal poetry, … the only kind of poetry that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.” The task of such poetry, he claims in this fragment, should be to “fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical; poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor.” In a similar vein, he raises the stakes for what should be achieved by the genre that is not merely a genre—the novel: a “genuine theory of poetry would be a theory of the novel,” he claims.