With Schiller's death in 1805, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe felt he had lost “the half of his existence,” and he wrote a magnificent tribute to his great friend in Epilog zu Schillers Glocke (“Epilogue to Schiller's Bells”). His intellectual loneliness was eased in some measure by his relations to the new school of Romantics then flourishing in Jena, for they had much in common. Friedrich von Schlegel had begun his career with a book extolling Greek culture and gone on to praise the Orient as the summit of Romantic thought and poetry. His brother Wilhelm's absorption in form and metre was after Goethe's own heart, and he could not be indifferent to their enthusiastic praise of Wilhelm Meister or to Novalis' description of him as “the viceregent of poetry upon earth.” In Bettina Brentano, daughter of his old love, Maximiliane von La Roche, he found an ardent response to both his genius and his humanity, and her Briefwechsel Goethes mit einem Kinde (1835; “Goethe's Correspondence with a Child”) remains one of the most readable books in German literature, whatever doubts may be cast on its reliability. Though Goethe decried the Romantics as “forced talents,” amateurishly oblivious of the virtues of form, though he deplored their catholicizing tendencies, their uncritical addiction to all things medieval, their attempts to blur the literary genres and confuse the boundaries between art and life, he yet remained open to many of their enthusiasms, even letting himself be moved to a renewed interest in Gothic architecture. And in Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) he drew heavily for his thematic material upon their preoccupation with “the night-side of nature,” with the animal, magnetic affinities that attract human beings to each other, as elements are attracted in the chemical world.
But this novel offers no support at all for a superstitious surrender to forces natural or supernatural, for a subhuman abdication of moral responsibility. Catastrophe follows inexorably upon the arbitrary interpretation of signs and portents; the heroine enters upon a path of renunciation that brings her near sainthood; marriage may be presented with ruthless realism as “a synthesis of impossibilities,” but it remains nevertheless “the beginning and end of all civilization.” The Romantics were here taught a lesson of social behaviour—and of artistic form. The narrative is conducted with a serene impartiality, and all the classical values of plasticity, restraint, and symmetry are brought to bear on a subject that is sensational to the point of improbability.
By their translations—Romanticism is translation, Clemens Brentano declared—the Romantics were opening up the literary treasures of the world, and Weltliteratur was to become one of Goethe's most treasured concepts. Its aim was, as he put it, to advance civilization by encouraging mutual understanding and respect—whether through translation or criticism (his own attempts to interpret Serbian poetry to the Germans is an excellent example of this latter) or through the blending of different literary traditions. Two great ballads, “Der Gott und die Bajadere” (“God and the Dancing Girl”) and “Paria” (“Outcast”), and two exquisite cycles, the late and lesser known Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten (“Chinese-German Hours and Seasons”; 1830) and the West-östlicher Divan (1819), are his own outstanding attempts to marry East with West. This latter is a book of love in all its aspects—tender, playful, sensuous, ironic, wise, and wanton—all of it irradiated by that quality of Geist—of intellect, spirit, wit—which he discerned as “the predominant passion” of Persian poetry. His living muse this time, Marianne, the young wife of his friend von Willemer, was perhaps the most completely satisfying of all his loves, so attuned to him in spirit that she could even take a hand in the creation of some of these poems. --Encyclopedia Britannica
Aspirennies.com -- Nature, Romance, Wisdom Explored through quotations, poetry, philosophy
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Enter a literary realm filled with the Romance, Nature and Wisdom of centuries. A journey through the virtual windows of the mind. Points of light abound throughout these pages, illuminating many concepts, that have been neglected through the passage of time. ...easily, one of the most book-marked poetry collections on the Internet!
Love Poetry: 100 Love Poems: A special selection of 100 passionate Love Poems that seemingly embody the philosophical essence of pleasure, delight, beauty, happiness, ecstasy, joy, longing, frustration, pain and fear.
