Goethe's poetry: Lecture 1

Quotations

  1. '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.)
  2. '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.)
  3. '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.)
  4. '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.)
  5. '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.)
  6. '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.)
  7. '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.)
  8. '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.)
  9. 'Alle Poesie soll belehrend sein, aber unmerklich.' (Goethe, 'Über das Lehrgedicht' (1827).)
  10. 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.)
  11. 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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