Schlegel, AUGUST WILHELM VON, German critic, poet, and translator, was born at Hanover on 8th September 1767, and began to study theology at Göttingen, but, like his younger brother Friedrich (see below), soon turned to literature, writing poems for two magazines edited by the poet Bürger, and later for Schiller's Horen, and contributing to the Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen and other periodicals. In 1795 he settled in Jena, and in 1796 married a widow lady, Caroline Böhmier (1763-1809), the clever, restless daughter of Professor Michaelis, who separated from him in 1803, and at once married Schelling. In 1798 Schlegel was appointed professor of Literature and Fine Art in that university; and the years 1801-4 he spent in Berlin, lecturing on the subjects he had taught at Jena. The greater part of the following fourteen years he lived in the house of Madame de Staël at Coppet on the Lake of Geneva; the chief incidents that mark this period of his life were the delivery of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (Eng. trans. 1815) at Vienna in 1808, and his officiating as secretary to the Crown-prince of Sweden during the war of liberation (1813-14). In 1818 he was appointed professor of Literature in the university of Bonn, a post he filled down to his death there on 12th May 1845. He had already, years before going to Bonn, done what has proved to be his best work: gifted with considerable feeling for poetic form and much fine taste, he translated into German verse most of the works of Shakespeare, and followed up the success he thereby achieved by publishing admirable translations of Dante, Calderon, Cervantes, Camoens, and other foreign masters of literature. The translation of Shakespeare, afterwards revised and continued by Tieck, is still the classic German version. Along with his brother Friedrich he enjoyed great influence throughout Germany as one of the most active leaders of the Romantic movement, his critical papers in Das Athenaeum and in the volume of Charakteristiken und Kritiken (1801) being greatly valued in their day. In Bonn he devoted his attention principally to Indian studies, and issued editions of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Ramayana. Heine attended his lectures at Bonn, and learned from him many of the secrets of poetic workmanship; for A. W. Schlegel's own poems, lifeless and cold as they are, show no little finish as to form. Heine's picture of the vain old dictator of letters coming to lecture to his class is worth quoting: 'He wore kid gloves and was dressed after the latest Paris fashion; he still had about him the perfume of elegant society and eau de mille fleurs; he was the beau-ideal of elegance and politeness, and when he spoke of the English Lord of the Treasury he always began with the words "My friend." Beside him stood his servant, dressed in the grand livery of the noble house of Schlegel; his business was to snuff the wax candles in the silver candlesticks that stood, along with a glass of sugared water, on the desk before him, the "genius of the age." His inordinate self-esteem, and the unwarranted influence he enjoyed, led him to pass severe censure upon the literary work of men like Schiller, Wieland, and Kotzebue, and involved him in unseemly polemics. Apart from this feature, his judgment as a critic in matters of pure literary taste makes his lectures still worthy of consideration, especially the set already named and another series, Ueber Theorie und Geschichte der bildenden Künste, delivered at Berlin in 1827. His writings were published in three separate collections—Sämtliche Werke (12 vols. Leip. 1846-47), Œuvres écrites en Français (3 vols. 1846), and Opuscula quæ Latine scripta reliquit (1848).
See the books quoted under FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL; the letters of his first wife, edited by Waitz under the title Karoline (3 vols. 1871-82); and Mrs Alfred Sidgwick's Caroline Schlegel and her Friends (1889).