 The shift between Schlegel’s classicist and romantic phases presents an interpretive challenge that is frequently discussed in the literature. On the one hand, scholars have stressed that what Schlegel now commends in romantic poetry are the very same facets he had previously condemned (for example, Eichner 1970, 49, who lists here the tendency toward the purely imaginative; the mixing of genres; the trend toward didacticism, irony and parody; the fusion of poetry and philosophy). On the other hand, many have noticed that there are seeds in the Studium essay of the later view—Schlegel’s praise of poets like Dante, Goethe and Shakespeare often seems at odds with the essay’s valorization of ancient poetry.