Poetic Predecessors Research Articles

From Genre to Gender: On Goethe's "Der Wandrer"

ELIZABETH POWERS From Genre to Gender: On Goethe's "Der Wandrer" THOUGH IMITATION HAS HISTORICALLY been the predominant force in artistic production, in the course of the eighteenth century artists sought to emancipate themselves from the practice of imitation. In this respect, Goethe's work, despite clear evidence of its reliance on previous literary models, has rightly been seen as representing a break with this practice. In an interpretative tradition influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey's insights, this break has been characterized not simply as a break with the past but also as a break with the artifactual nature of art, instead translating "experience" into poetic formulation.1 I have tried to show that the so-called experience (Erlebnis) that Goethe's work seems to evidence instead reflects this poetic emancipation : experience is what one has when one doesn't do what everyone else does. In poetic terms, this means not following a model, not being limited by the restrictions of genre. Thus, as I have argued in another context,2 the Sesenheim idyll depicted in Dichtung und Wahrheit, whatever its reality content, represents one of the inherited literary forms from which Goethe had to free himself, while the charms and beauty of Friederike Brion represent the spell that such forms exert. Ultimately , Goethe's rejection of Friederike indicates his poetic emancipation . At the same time, the idyll at Sesenheim has been richly interpreted as a love affair of a certain sort. But love affairs are what young men had (I speak now of the eighteenth century) who did not conform to traditional expectations—marriage to the first suitable female followed by confining domesticity. Read in this light, the idyll also reflects the restricted circumstances of the traditional order of life from which men (and, in the first instance, they were men) began to emancipate themselves in the eighteenth century. This pattern of "experience"—the individual's rejection of traditional expectations in order to forge a destiny that was sui generis — finds a counterpart in a word that enjoyed wide currency in the eighteenth century, namely, "originality." This term, however, meaning "having no origins," being indebted to no literary progenitors, is clearly at odds with its etymology. It is a rhetorical move asserting its escape from genealogy, Hterary or otherwise. 32 Elizabeth Powers The biological metaphors point up the inability to escape from our human, creaturely condition: none of us arises ex nihilo, and even the crafting of a language of "individual" expression means of necessity wresting it from the language already spoken by one's poetic predecessors . The eighteenth-century use of such metaphors conveys a realignment in the conception of poetic creativity, a realignment that finds its most comprehensive expression in Goethe's work. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Goethe felt something like piety toward tradition, toward what had been passed down, particularly its vital role in forming the artist. It could not have been otherwise , since his entire poetic oeuvre was indebted to all the writers he had read as a child and went on reading, and whom, with his apparently prodigious memory, unfailing ear, and gift for mimicry, he absorbed into the body of that work until the end of his life. His loving and brilliant reconstruction of various traditional orders in Dichtung und Wahrheit—I am thinking of those portions that depict the patriarchal world of the Old Testament, the empire at the height of its brilliance , and the sacramental character of Roman Catholicism—is not that of an iconoclast. It is clear, however, that for Goethe such institutions no longer provided existential and certainly not artistic grounding. While these set pieces depict the great richness and power of inherited forms of life, their presence in a work that concerns Goethe's artistic development only highlights their insufficiency. They thus serve to stage the transition from the old certainties—what David Wellbery has called the "pre-established generic code," which, as he points out, had literary as well as larger cultural implications—to a new order.4 In poetic terms, this order marks a departure from the classical manner by which poets acknowledged their literary genealogy and grafted their own voices onto an evolving...

Virgil's Pastoral Programme: Theocritus, Callimachus andEclogue1

This study has a limited aim. It is to expand as fully as possible one aspect ofEclogue1. The aspect concerned covers Virgil's description of the nature of his pastoral poetry, its inspiration both by poetic predecessors and a living dedicatee, and the claims which he makes implicitly for his own poetic achievement in the volume to which this poem serves as introduction. Some of the points which I make have been picked up by others, but not, in my opinion, welded into a coherent reading of this entire aspect of the poem. I shall attempt to show that we have here a carefully composed preface to the book ofEclogues; that it establishes a programme of specifically Roman pastoral, derived from Theocritus, but with important critical allegiance to Callimachus; that this is achieved by placing at the centre of the poem a symbolic encounter of the poet with his ‘divine’ source of inspiration firmly in the tradition of Hesiod, Callimachus and many other poets (and prophets); that such a reading of the poem begets new and alternative interpretations of individual passages which help to confirm its validity; and that it is further confirmed by subsequent passages in Virgil himself and in other writers. In so doing I shall touch hardly or not at all upon the historical, political, social and legal questions which the poem raises and which have always been in the forefront of discussion of it. This is not because I consider them irrelevant to the overall interpretation of the poem. They are, in fact, crucial. I have, however, little that is new to say on these matters and to have pursued them would have deflected me from my task of trying to set the work firmly within its literary tradition and to expound its central literary content.