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Phantastes Chapter 16: Life And The Ideal, Friedrich Von Schiller

German Romantic and Other Influences

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) was a German writer, primarily known as a dramatist, poet, and literary critic. Das Ideal und das Leben (Life and the Ideal, 1795) is a philosophical poem. The Oxford Reference reports that the poem was “first published in 1795 in No. 9 of Die Horen, with the title ‘Das Reich der Schatten’. Schiller changed this in 1800 to ‘Das Reich der Formen’, and adopted the present title in 1804.” Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), writer and politician, translated the poem in 1844 as Ideal and Actual Life. Bulwer-Lytton began his novel Paul Clifford …