The Forgotten Genre: The Poetic Epistle in Eighteenth-Century German Literature

Abstract

The Forgotten Genre: The Poetic Epistle in Eighteenth-Century German Literature MARKUS F. MOTSCH Among Goethe’s contributions to the first two volumes of the Horen, the literary periodical edited by Schiller, were two poetic epistles. Making use of a humorous and slightly ironic style, these two pieces consider the influence that literature, particularly the novel, exerts on the reader. Appended to the second epistle is the remark “Die Fortsetzung folgt” (to be continued), a promise that was not kept; in the 1815 edition of his poems, Goethe intro­ duces the two epistles with the lines: “Gerne hatt’ ich fortgeschrieben, / Aber es ist liegen blieben” (gladly would I have continued, but never got around to). Presumably it was pure coincidence that Goethe, preoccupied with other tasks, did not continue his epistles. On the other hand, his omission may have been symptomatic of the declining interest in this genre, for although a number of verse epistles were written by nineteenth-century authors (and even by twentieth-century authors such as Bert Brecht and Erich Kastner), German literary scholarship has not much concerned itself with the genre since the middle of the nineteenth century. Only recently, one German scholar introduced an article on the epistle by stating that to judge from modern reference works standard in the field, he was about to discuss a subject that did not even exist.1 Despite his interest in the subject, apparently even he was unaware of the tremendous popularity the poetic epistle has enjoyed during the entire eighteenth and much of the seventeenth century, for 119 120 / MARKUS F. MOTSCH he treats the time span between Horace and the nineteenth-century poet Eduard Morike with silence. To Horace, of course, together with Ovid, belongs the credit for having made the poetic epistle a popular genre of literature. The tradition of the subject matter, tone, and form chosen by the two Roman poets for their epistles can be traced in epistolary poetry throughout the ages, as is evi­ denced, for instance, by a letter of November 10, 1714, to The Spectator, offering “some remarks upon the epistolatory way of writing in verse.” The anonymous author differentiates between two types of epistles, the one com­ prising “love-letters, letters of friendship, and letters upon mournful occa­ sions,” for which Ovid is cited as the best example; the other, for which Horace serves as model, includes “epistles in verse, as may properly be called familiar, critical, and moral; to which may be added letters of mirth and humour. ... He that is ambitious of succeeding in the Ovidian way,” the author continues, “should first examine his heart well, and feel whether his passions (especially those of the gentler kind) play easy; since it is not his wit, but the delicacy and tenderness of his sentiments, that will affect his readers. . . . The qualifications requisite for writing epistles, after the model given us by Horace, are of a quite different nature. He that would excel in this kind must have a good fund of strong masculine sense: to this there must be joined a thorough knowledge of mankind, together with an insight into the business, and the prevailing humours of the age.”2 Among the host of other qualifications stipulated by the author of the letter are “the finest precepts of morality,” “a lively turn of wit,” and to “appear a man of the world throughout.” Later in the century, in 1770, Christoph Martin Wieland sum­ marized all this by saying that one has to be a Horace in order to write poetic epistles like Horace.3 Given that both Horace and Ovid were, next to Virgil, the most widely read poets of Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages, it is not surprising that the poetic epistle survived well as a genre in medieval Latin literature. Hexameter epistles were written by the members of Charlemagne’s Court Academy, and they were part of the correspondence between learned monks, clerics, noble ladies, and nuns. Frequently, these epistles contain exchanges of scholarly thoughts and philosophical ideas, sometimes they offer witty remarks and friendly advice, and occasionally they are simply letters of friendship and love. The influence of both Horace and Ovid is evident in...