* Here one might trace the dialectic movements in a different direction.
* Here one might trace the dialectic movements in a different direction. Heaven predicts a personal misfortune due to the marriage, so he could just as well give up the marriage yet needn't give up the girl on that account, but live in a romantic relationship with her which was more than satisfactory for the lovers. This, however, amounts to insulting the girl, for in his love for her he doesn't express the universal, and it was the task both of the poet and of the ethicist to defend marriage. On the whole, were poetry to attend to the religious aspect and to the inner feeling of its characters, it would command themes of much greater importance than those it now occupies itself with. Here is the story poetry is repeatedly giving us: a man is stuck with a girl he once loved, or maybe never really loved because he has now seen another who is the ideal. A man makes mistakes in life, it was the right street but the wrong house, for on the second floor just over the way lives the ideal – that's what people consider the proper subject of poetry. A lover makes a mistake, he saw his loved one by candlelight and thought she had dark hair, but look!, on closer inspection she was blonde – however, the sister, there's the ideal. That's what people think poetry is about. In my view any such man is an impudent fool who can be unbearable enough in life but should be instantly booed off the stage when he tries to put on airs in poetry. Only the clash of passion against passion provides a poetic collision, not this rummaging about in the particulars of the same passion. In the Middle Ages, for example, when a girl has fallen in love and then been convinced that earthly love is a sin and prefers a heavenly love, here we have a poetic collision; and the girl too is poetic, for her life is in the idea.