Geordnete Spontaneität: Lyrische Subjektivität bei Achim von Arnim by Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz (review)

This dissertation contributes to an emerging trend in literary studies that dismisses the doctrine of an aesthetics of autonomy, which aims to interpret individual poems as unique lyrical events, in favor of a more holistic phenomenological approach that considers lyric poetry capable of revealing emotive and cognitive processes, metapoetic reflections, and important general insights into our human condition. Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz uses Achim von Arnim’s poetry to make his case for such an approach.

Although Achim von Arnim has certainly not gained the reputation of a leading Romantic poet—his critics found his poems lacking in emotional depth, beauty, and consistency of quality—Jost-Fritz considers Arnim’s prolific, yet often raw and unfinished, lyric productions exemplary for the period’s epistemological transformations and semantic crises. His attempt at a more positive reassessment is based on the definition of the lyrical genre “als Medium” that operates at the intersections between “Natur und Geist, Leib und Seele” (9) and also balances out the spontaneity of ingenious creativity in the laborious process of articulating lyrical events in poetic language and form. Poetry reflects the experiences of the inner life with the outer world and the poet’s engagement with the principal discourses of the politically, philosophically, and scientifically revolutionary era at the turn of the nineteenth century. The totality of emerging poems thus constitutes a subjective poetic vision of reality that manifests and reflects the poet’s individuality.

With this premise, Jost-Fritz contradicts the two main previous studies on the same topic by Ulfert Ricklefs and Thomas Sternberg, who detect a lack of subjectivity as the trademark of Arnim’s poems and present him as a pioneer of modern poetry. To collect the traces of subjectivity that he asserts, Jost-Fritz analyzes the form as well as the poetological and anthropological content of a selective cross section of Arnim’s lyric oeuvre. Chapter 1 deals primarily with two earlier poems (“Wenig Töne sind verliehen” and “Ein Herzog sinnt beim Wasserfall”) that pro-grammatically reflect on the problematic relationship between subjective sensitivity and linguistic objectification at the core of Arnim’s poetic persona. Chapter 2 shows in a detailed analysis of two versions of the same poem, entitled “Waldgeschrey” (1808) and “Stolze Einsamkeit” (1813), how poetic subjectivity aims to consolidate its precarious identity in a series of self-reflections resulting in an ever more religiously charged subliminal experience that, according to Jost-Fritz, indicates the dawn of a new phase in Arnim’s lyric oeuvre. The longer romances Die Rose and Der Rheinfall, the subject matter of the following chapter, display the poet’s quest to further explore the depths of the human psyche and the richness of individual experience within cultural history and society. At the end of both poems, the lyric subject realizes the limits of his purely immanent soul- and world-wrenching and articulates his longing for salvation from this earth-bound existence. Chapter 4 covers no fewer than ninety-three sonnets of the cycle Geschichte des Herrn Sonet, which Jost-Fritz reads as an implicit Bildungsroman. Here, Arnim recapitulates his poetic career and metapoetically reflects the poetic process as a whole, which results, for Jost-Fritz, in a “sentimen-tale Ästhetik” (250). The final chapter, dealing mostly with examples from Arnim’s later poetry, picks up the central theme of poetry as mediating between two different worlds and states of mind/affect by shifting to a cosmic scale with poetic subjectivity “hovering” between heaven and earth, immanence and transcendence. Here, the lyric voice expresses the poet’s thoughts and feelings “durch eine Art erhabener Ironie” (250) that quintessentially captures the tragic reality of the human condition and yet also affirms its potential for freedom by means of poetry and art.

This brief summary cannot do justice to the nuanced and subtle readings of the mentioned poems, which are strongest in the chapters that deal with only a few individual poems. In...