The poet, I said, is either nature, or he will seek it. The former produces the naive, the latter the sentimental poet.
and:
Should one now apply the concept of poetry, which is nothing other than to give humanity its most complete expression possible, to both of these states, so it ensues, that there in the state of natural simplicity, where man still acts with all his powers at one time, as an harmonious unity, where therefore all his nature expresses itself completely in reality, the poet must imitate the real as completely as possible—that, on the contrary, here in the state of culture, where that harmonious cooperation of its entire nature is merely an idea, the poet must elevate reality to the ideal or, what amounts to the same, represent the ideal.Perhaps, in this respect at least, not too far from what we thought he might have meant by the word 'sentimental'.
