Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Summary
Alexander von Humboldt's dedication of his Essay on the Geography of Plants (1807) to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is an homage of the scientist to the poet whose essay on the Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) had shown how the concurrence of science and the creative spirit could unveil a perfect work of art inspired by nature, evoking admiration and awe for invisible forces yet to be discovered. While Humboldt's essay itself documents scientific botanical and ethnological observations and empirical data the author gained on his journey through South and Central America, its intermittent poetic language can be read as a response to Goethe's intellectual and creative life. Moreover, it can be argued that Humboldt seeks to emulate the creative spirit modeled by Goethe and defined by Novalis and Friedrich Schelling, namely, that nature can be mediated through the poetic spirit. For Humboldt, this poetic spirit is developed through experience, sharpened by a keen talent for observation, both achieved through the complete and total immersion in nature. For Goethe, Humboldt had lit science with an “aesthetic breeze” into a “bright flame.”
The interdependence of ethnography and the creative imagination, science and poetry, produced a body of work penned by writers who either relied on accounts disseminated by those who had encountered non-Western cultures or were drawing from their own experience as they had traveled to distant places themselves. For Humboldt and Goethe, science and poetry were not mutually exclusive, but rather drew inspiration from one another through the power of observation and contemplation of the ontology of the natural world. Whereas science questioned the material world to produce a deeper understanding of the laws of nature, the poetic vision transposed the beautiful and sublime into language that mediated what had been observed and disseminated in meticulously documented scientific writings, abundantly illustrated with incomparable artistic craftsmanship and beauty.
Humboldt, one of the most prominent ethnographers of his time, was one of several German scientists whose travel accounts, complemented by a growing corpus of similar scientific contributions introduced Europe and Germany in particular, to a new construct of an exoticized indigenous Other, which turned the Man of Nature into the Noble Savage.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives , pp. 303 - 324Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021