British Germanophiles

Abstract

Coleridge’s discovery of Schiller’s drama in the 1790s culminated in the translation of Wallenstein, but his exploration of his work as a poet and thinker was just beginning. The following decade brought him in contact with nearly the entire corpus of Schiller’s published writing. The reason for this interest lay in the recognition of Schiller’s unique contribution to post-Kantian aesthetics: the extension of Idealism’s formalist preoccupations into the world of action by way of a new anthropology: that man is only fully human when he is ‘at play’.