Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Special Section on Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- Intimacy, Morality, and the Inner Problematic of the Lyric
- Beyond the Poem: Strategies of Metapoetic Reflection in Goethe's Erster Weimarer Gedichtsammlung
- Meistersänger als Beruf: The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes …”
- Song or Narration?: Goethe's Mignon
- The Sucking Subject: Structural Ambiguities of Goethe's “Auf dem See” in Literary and Linguistic Perspective
- “Höhere Begattung,” “höhere Schönheit”: Goethe's Homoerotic Poem “Selige Sehnsucht”
- Poetry after Faust
- Forms of Knowledge/Knowledge of Forms: The Epistemology of Goethe's West-östlicher Divan and Cavellian Skepticism
- Im flüßgen Element bin und wieder schweifen: Development and Return in Goethe's Poetry and Hegel's Philosophy
- Goethe's Historical Particularism and the “Right Hand” of History: Early Modern State Building, Nobility, and the Feud in Götz von Berlichingen
- Where Are the Mountains?: Johann Jacob Bodmer and the “Pre-Kantian Sublime”
- The Politics of Aesthetic Humanism: Schiller's German Idea of Freedom
- Romanticism's Old German as Stepping-Stone to Goethe's World Literature
- Book Reviews
Beyond the Poem: Strategies of Metapoetic Reflection in Goethe's Erster Weimarer Gedichtsammlung
from Special Section on Goethe's Lyric Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Special Section on Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- Intimacy, Morality, and the Inner Problematic of the Lyric
- Beyond the Poem: Strategies of Metapoetic Reflection in Goethe's Erster Weimarer Gedichtsammlung
- Meistersänger als Beruf: The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes …”
- Song or Narration?: Goethe's Mignon
- The Sucking Subject: Structural Ambiguities of Goethe's “Auf dem See” in Literary and Linguistic Perspective
- “Höhere Begattung,” “höhere Schönheit”: Goethe's Homoerotic Poem “Selige Sehnsucht”
- Poetry after Faust
- Forms of Knowledge/Knowledge of Forms: The Epistemology of Goethe's West-östlicher Divan and Cavellian Skepticism
- Im flüßgen Element bin und wieder schweifen: Development and Return in Goethe's Poetry and Hegel's Philosophy
- Goethe's Historical Particularism and the “Right Hand” of History: Early Modern State Building, Nobility, and the Feud in Götz von Berlichingen
- Where Are the Mountains?: Johann Jacob Bodmer and the “Pre-Kantian Sublime”
- The Politics of Aesthetic Humanism: Schiller's German Idea of Freedom
- Romanticism's Old German as Stepping-Stone to Goethe's World Literature
- Book Reviews
Summary
While the frankfurt edition suggests that Goethe's poems ought to be read in the contexts of carefully crafted ensembles and cycles, it remains common practice to analyze them in distinct isolation. Even in a study as monumental and sophisticated as David Wellbery's The Specular Moment, poems such as “Ganymed” and “Prometheus,” which Goethe regularly placed side by side, are subjected to extensive exegesis without any reflection of their spatial conjunction. Yet Goethe's lyric poetry consists of dynamic poetic processes that surpass the lyric capacity of individual poems. By focusing on the so-called great hymns of the “Geniezeit,” which are commonly regarded as paradigms of the aesthetic autonomy of the individual artwork, this article aims to show how these poems in fact contribute to the realization of a certain poetic idea that transgresses the limits of lyrical expression in single texts. to bring this overall poetic idea to light, Goethe employs the strategy of juxtaposing related poems in the arrangements of certain ensembles, thereby fashioning specific contexts of transmission. I call this strategy “metapoetic” for two reasons: first, because it reveals how the dynamic of the poetic process reaches beyond individual poems; and second, because the hermeneutic reflection of the intertextual relations among the poems of an ensemble generates insight into the “poetologic” of the production process as such.
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- Information
- Goethe Yearbook 20 , pp. 25 - 58Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013