Kierkegaard's writings are severely complicated and readers often do not know what to make of them given the array of genres he deploys. He is at once a philosopher, theologian, literary critic, and poet in his own right who writes under multiple pseudonyms directed at an unsure audience. The Divine Madness of Romantic Ideals offers a close and extensive reading of this puzzling production, showing how its disarming, concrete themes of personal love and marriage help unlock more abstract conceptual boxes within Kierkegaard's authorship for a general readership, pointing out the forest while paying scrupulous attention to the trees. The overall perspective of Stages on LIfe's Way is tracked in detail to show how the oft-evoked esthetic, ethical, and religious spheres of human life are concretely distinguished and problematically related in a kind of single developmental stage.