German Renaissance Literature

Abstract

German literary history, like every other literary history, is afflicted with pseudomorphs, false basic assumptions as to backgrounds and developments, premature conclusions and syntheses, that are so compelling that any facts and phenomena running contrary to the established order stand no chance of being considered objectively and evaluated according to their merit. Two examples, with extensions, will serve to illustrate this. The first is initially personal, connected with American rather than German literature, and yet revelatory of the nature of literary history in general as well as of that of the German Renaissance in particular. The other has to do with a major discovery that was made in 1927 but has not yet been assimilated, simply because it destroys all the established assumptions as to the origins and development of the German Renaissance lyric. This strange inhibition in the study of the lyric is only one instance of the problems that beset German Renaissance literature; indeed it points to further problems and, we may hope, also to ways toward their solution. The first example is concerned with the origins of my First Century of New England Verse, 1944. In the course of my investigations of the important German influences on the New England Puritan 398