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Goethe Essentials |
German Poetry
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Works of the storm and stress period Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's stay in Leipzig was cut short by severe illness, and by the autumn of 1768 he was back home. A long convalescence fostered introspection and religious mysticism. He played with alchemy, astrology, and occult philosophy, all of which left their mark on Faust. On his recovery it was decided that he should pursue legal studies in Strassburg as a first stage on the way to Paris and the Grand Tour (never actually completed). His stay there proved a turning point for his whole life and work. In this German capital of a French province, he experienced a reaction against the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Leipzig and under the impact of the great cathedral proclaimed his conversion to the Gothic German ideal. More decisive still was the influence of J.G. Herder, who spent the winter of 1770–71 there undergoing treatment for his eyes. From him Goethe learned the role played by touch, the haptic sense, in the growth of the mind; a new view of the artist as a creator fashioning forms expressive of feeling; a new theory of poetry as the original and most vital language of man; the virtues of a new style, that of the Volkslied (folk song) and the poetry of “primitive” peoples as enshrined in the Bible, the epics of Homer, and the poems attributed (falsely) to Ossian, a 3rd-century Celtic poet. It is this new sense of felt immediacy, and of the plasticity of his linguistic medium, that informs the lyrics Goethe wrote to one of his early loves, Friederike Brion, the pastor's daughter of Sesenheim. They mark the beginning of a new epoch in the German lyric. Such poems as “Mailied” (“May Song”) and “Willkommen und Abschied” (“Welcome and Farewell”) are still the most popular, though not the greatest, of his Lieder. The latter, especially in its revised form of 1790, touchingly expresses the guilt he felt that this time he himself had the role of deserter and rejecter, and the whole idyll as recounted in Dichtung und Wahrheit reveals that cross-fertilization of life and literature that he increasingly saw as a potent factor in human development. If, as Herder maintained, energy was one of the marks of poetry, it was clearly in the passions acted out on the stage that it could find its most vital expression. And where more vital than in the colossal figures of the “Gothic Shakespeare”? In writing the Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand dramatisiert (1771; “The Dramatized History of Gottfried von Berlichingen of the Iron Hand”), Goethe was deliberately vying with Shakespeare. For the real Götz, who died two years before Shakespeare was born, was near enough in time to represent that bustling spacious 16th century, the animal vitality of which contrasted so forcibly with the straitlaced affectations of Goethe's own day. With the publication in 1773 of Götz von Berlichingen, a radically tautened version of that “History,” the Shakespeare cult was launched, and the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement was provided with its first major work of genius. The manifesto of the movement, heralded by Goethe's enthusiastic Rede zum Schakespears Tag (“Conversation from Shakespeare's Day”), had appeared after Goethe's return to Frankfurt in August 1771. “Von deutscher Art und Kunst” (“Concerning German Nature and Art”), as it was called, contained a defense of German nationality by the historian J.M. Möser, two essays by Herder championing Ossian and Shakespeare, and a rhapsody on Gothic architecture by Goethe. --Encyclopedia Britannica |
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