Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine

Hear, O seekers of wisdom and justice, the words of Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, the philosopher and poet of Romantic thought: “Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.” In this utterance, he unveils a wound both ancient and enduring—that art, like society, often mirrors injustice. Women, he laments, have been confined by poets to narrow roles, their reality distorted, their humanity fragmented. The pen, which should liberate truth, has too often chained it.

The meaning of this teaching lies in the tension between how women are portrayed in literature and how they are treated in the world. In poetry, women are too often reduced to extremes: they are made either feminine, bound to sweetness, beauty, and fragility, or they are made idealistic, symbols of virtue or lofty abstraction, stripped of their earthbound humanity. Rarely are they permitted to be both. Thus, poetry, like life, betrays them, denying the fullness of their being. Schlegel’s words shine a light upon this imbalance, calling out the blindness of both art and society.

The origin of this insight is rooted in Schlegel’s place in the Romantic era, when poets sought to elevate emotion, beauty, and idealism. Yet even in their exalted visions, women were often relegated to muses or symbols, not living souls with depth. Schlegel, in his sharpness, noted this contradiction: that the very movement which prized imagination still perpetuated injustice. By naming it, he reminds us that art is not free from the prejudices of its age, and that poets must strive to see more clearly than the world they inhabit.

Consider the story of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman emerged against the same cultural currents. She decried the way society confined women to roles of beauty and passivity, leaving them uneducated, unseen, and unfree. Her words, like Schlegel’s, recognized the injustice of duality: that women were not allowed to be whole. She fought to break the boundaries imposed by both life and art, declaring that women are not muses or ornaments but thinkers, creators, and equals.

Think also of Emily Dickinson, whose poetry emerged later, in the silence of her own solitude. Society expected women to be domestic, soft, and unassuming. Yet Dickinson’s words were fierce, probing, and idealistic, even as her existence was humble and cloistered. In her we see the very contradiction Schlegel identified: the feminine, bound to life, and the idealistic, bound to eternity, residing in one soul. Her art revealed that the division was false, that women could embody both, if only the world allowed them.

O children of tomorrow, know this: when art diminishes women, it diminishes humanity. For woman is not only muse but maker, not only beauty but power, not only heart but mind. To see her fully is to see truth fully. To deny her depth is to blind oneself to half the wisdom of the world. Schlegel’s words are a reminder that even poetry—the realm of imagination—must not fall prey to injustice, but must lead the way to liberation.

Practical wisdom calls you: when you read, when you write, when you speak, question the images of women you encounter. Ask: is she whole? Does she live with the same depth, contradictions, and humanity as men are allowed? And when you create, create women who are not trapped in archetypes, but who breathe, strive, love, fail, and triumph as real souls. In this way, both life and art are redeemed together.

Therefore, remember the counsel of Schlegel: “Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life.” Let your voice, your art, your choices break this chain. For to honor women in their fullness is to honor truth itself, and to grant poetry the power not only to mirror the world but to heal it. And the world that allows women to be both feminine and idealistic will be a world richer in beauty, justice, and light.

––