Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (after 1814:
von)
Schlegel (10 March 1772 – 12 January 1829) was a
German poet,
literary critic,
philosopher,
philologist and
indologist. With his older brother,
August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of the
Jena romantics. He was a zealous promoter of the Romantic movement and inspired
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Adam Mickiewicz and
Kazimierz Brodzinski. Schlegel was a pioneer in
Indo-European studies,
comparative linguistics, in what became known as
Grimm's law, and
morphological typology. As a young man he was an atheist, a radical, and an individualist. Ten years later, the same Schlegel converted to Catholicism. Around 1810 he was a diplomat and journalist in the service of Metternich, surrounded by monks and pious men of society.