Goethes Liebeslyrik. Semantiken der Leidenschaft um 1800 ed. by Carsten Rohde, Thorsten Valk (review)

Goethe once ascribed to his idealist companion Schiller a surprising disposition for dependency, observing that the friend had always been under the sway of women. It could be argued that the reverse is true for Goethe himself. Throughout his life, he was surrounded by women who handily provided not only catalysts for his vehemently passionate feelings but also canvases onto which he could project them. German lyrical poetry owes some of its most original and enduring pieces to Goethe’s encounters with various female partners. Seen together and arranged in chronological order, the lyrical manifestations of these encounters amount to something akin to an intimate autobiography. To be sure, Goethe himself has always scorned critics for noisily preying on details of his life and insisted instead on the poet’s ability to transform experiences into images. The essays in this superb collection on the subject of Goethes Liebeslyrik—surprisingly the first of its kind—balance both approaches. Building on decades of research produced by Goethephilologie, they are keenly aware of the particular circumstances of Goethe’s life at any phase but they are also acutely attuned to the polyphony of voices that are heard in the poems and that call for equally complex and heterogeneous scholarly approaches—a well-taken point the editors highlight at the end of their introduction.

The chapters are ordered chronologically, beginning with the Rococo masquerades involving unidentified partners, then moving to Friederike Brion and the early love poetry, before centering on the Roman elegies with their nameless erotic playmate, and ending with the elegies of aging devoted to the nineteen-year old Ulrike von Levetzow. This organizational principle works well for the short, intense affairs that generate an immediate output, often identified by the location of the encounter—the Sesenheim songs, the Marienbad elegies, etc. They are less suited to the blending of experiences of the kind taking place in the highly sensual Roman elegies that weave together Goethe’s experiences in Italy with the appearance of Christiane Vulpius or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the famed ‘love of renunciation’ Goethe practiced at least for a decade with Charlotte von Stein; or even to the idiosyncratic exchanges he cultivated with Marianne von Willemer and assembled in the erratic books of the West-östlicher Divan. But this perhaps only illustrates the editors’ point that polyphonic poetry driven by the poetic force of love is unlikely to conform to simple principles but rather unfolds as a complex semantics.

For Goethe’s early years, Thorsten Valk begins with the investigation of this semantics in the Rococo, showing how the erotically charged games of masking and hiding prefigure tropes of the veil and the “verbergendes Enthüllen” so crucial to Goethe’s later work. Jan Röhnert reads a number of the Sesenheim poems, dedicated to Friederike Brion and the lesser-known Lili Schönemann, not as an exercise in Erlebnislyrik but as articulations of the anthropologically determined language of the senses. Alexander Košenina discovers the pulsating heart in its organic dimension and makes a case for terming Goethe’s production since Werther “Kardiopoetik.” No fewer than four essays deal with different aspects of the Roman Elegies, highlighting their potential to bridge myth and eros (Nikolas Immer); to create moments of presence and self-reflexivity (Sandra Richter); to renew the Ancient Roman poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, Catullus, and Ovid in generating a love that is deeply sensual, yet free from constrictions and commitment (Uwe Japp); and to evoke sensations of color that anticipate in certain respects the later Farbenlehre (Margit Vogt). Several essays pursue similar lines of inquiry, offering revealing readings for Goethe’s Orientalizing authorship in the Divan (Andrea Polaschegg) or for specific poems, such as “An den Mond” (Bernhard Fischer) and “Das Tagebuch” (Dirk von Petersdorff). The final section of the collection specializes in comparisons. Peter Burdorf considers the classical form of the elegy in...