 Schlegel’s intellectual biography begins in what is usually interpreted as a “classicist” phase. In his early Studium essay, Schlegel claimed that Greek poetry was “beautiful” while modern poetry was only “interesting” (interessant): ancient poetry strove for an ideal and was “objective,” while modern poetry was “characteristic” and strove for an originality that was “individual” or “mannered.” (A similar distinction, as many critics have noted, can be found in Schiller’s contemporaneous work On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. Schlegel apparently arrived at his distinction independently, although when he did encounter Schiller’s essay, it prompted him to reconsider his approach to more contemporary literature: see Eichner 1970, chapter 2, and Schlegel’s later preface to the Studium essay.)