Goethe's poetry: Lecture 1
Quotations
- 'It is in his poetry [...] that Goethe is clearly at his greatest.
[...] It is as Goethe the poet that he most surely holds his place
among the supreme European élite.' (David Luke, Introduction
to Goethe, Selected Verse, Harmondsworth, p.xvii.)
- 'Michael Bogdanov's production of the two parts of Faust
for the Royal Shakespeare Company is a vivid illustration of the
English-speaking world's discomfort with Goethe. The heirs of
Shakespeare and Tennyson can enter, at least partially, Dante's
cosmos, find much to engage them in Baudelaire and positively
embrace Anglo-Saxon-hating Rilke, but Goethe remains out of reach
to anyone not adept at German. His poetry in English translation
seems hardly poetry at all, but moral anecdote stiffened with
rhyme and jogging along on narrow-gauge metric rails. Germans,
of course, tell us that he is as magical as Shakespeare and equally
proverbial. Perhaps a prevalence of the aphoristic and sententious
in his verse upsets us. Whatever the reason, we find it hard to
swallow him unless his poetry is aborbed in music. [
]
'[Goethe] the Teutonic bard and keepsake aphorist [
]'
(Peter Porter, review of Faust, Royal Shakespeare Company,
in Times Literary Supplement, 22 September 1995.)
- 'Did it ever occur to you that [Goethe] was in some points
like Ben Franklin - a kind of rhymed Ben Franklin? [
] the
worldly wisdom of Poor Richard, versified' (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Hyperion (1839), quoted by Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany:
The Education of a Nation, London 1961, p. 43.)
- 'Of all the strongest Western writers, Goethe now seems the
least available to our sensibility. I suspect that this distance
has little to do with how badly his poetry translates into English.
Hölderlin translates poorly also, but his appeal to most
of us dwarfs Goethe's. A poet and wisdom writer who is his language's
equivalent of Dante can transcend inadequate translation but not
changes in life and literature that render his central attitudes
so remote from us as to seem archaic. Goethe is no longer our
ancestor, as he was Emerson's and Carlyle's. His wisdom abides,
but it seems to come from some solar system other than our own.
'[
] Though he stands at the true beginning of imaginative
literature in German, Goethe is, from a Western perspective, an
end rather than a beginning. [
] British and American poets
continue to rewrite Wordsworth involuntarily [
] one cannot
say that Goethe is a vital influence on German poetry at this
time.' (Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School
of the Ages, London 1994, pp. 203-204.)
- 'Today Kleist gives us pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom
bore.' (Susan Sontag, 'Simone Weil' (1963), in A Susan Sontag
Reader, New York 1982, p. 91.)
- 'Goethe wrote in the style of north-European folksongs and
popular ballads, and in sophisticated Italian verse-forms; he
imitated the hexameters of Homer, the elegies of Propetius, the
epigrams of Martial, the classical lyric poetry of Persia. [
]
he felt for a year or two the need to use sonnet form [
]
at seventy-eight he was trying his hand at imitating Chinese poetry.'
(Luke, pp. xix-xx.)
- 'In unmittelbarer zeitlicher Nachbarschaft letztgültiger
Verlautbarungen [kann] auch der liebenswerteste Kleinkram stehen.'
(Goethes Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und
Gespräche. Ed. Hendrik Birus et al. 40 vols. Bibliothek
deutscher Klassiker. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
Vol. 1: Gedichte 1756-1799, ed. Karl Eibl, 1987, p. 738.)
- 'Goethe was copious, but he was also various. [
] in
his verse he was [not] the monotonously self-repeating master
of a single style. His poetry went on living, changing, developing
[
]. Originality is [
] above all the refusal to imitate
oneself.' (Luke, p. xix.)
- 'Alle Poesie soll belehrend sein, aber unmerklich.' (Goethe,
'Über das Lehrgedicht' (1827).)
- Da sind sie nun! Da habt ihr sie!
Die Lieder, ohne Kunst und Müh
Am Rand des Bachs entsprungen.
Verliebt, und jung, und voll Gefühl
Trieb ich der Jugend altes Spiel,
Und hab sie so gesungen.
Sie singe, wer sie singen mag!
An einem hübschen Frühlingstag
Kann sie der Jüngling brauchen.
('Zueignung', from Neue Gedichte (1769); Gedichte 1756-1800,
p.95.)
- Views of 'Zueignung' (1784):
'One of Goethe's great self-assessments as a poet.' (Hans Rudolf
Vaget, Introduction to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman Elegies
and The Diary, London 1988, p. 21.)
'Nichts Schöners und Vollkommners in keiner Sprache.' (Christoph
Martin Wieland in 1792, quoted by Emil Staiger, Goethe,
vol. 1: 1749-1786, Zürich 1957, p. 478.)
'Würdig [...] neben den größten Werken [Goethes]
zu stehn.' (Friedrich Schlegel, 'Gespräch über die Poesie'
(1800).)
'Ponderous in its movement, periphrastic, full of clichés,
heavily symbolical and inflatedly solemn.' (Ronald Gray, Goethe:
A Critical Iintroduction, Cambridge 1967, p. 44.)
'The allegorical mechanisms [...] are dull and, worse, they creak
[...] . [
] padded lines [
] lines that are completely
redundant. If we add that the diction is by turns flat, slipshod
and strained, and that the ornamentation consists largely of dead
and dying metaphors, it will not be found surprising that this
poem contains some of the worst lines that Goethe ever wrote.'
(Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1:
The Poetry of Desire, Oxford 1991, p. 379.)
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