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  • Introduction: New Approaches to Goethe’s Lyric Poetry
  • Horst Lange and Christian P. Weber

This collection of articles emerged from a series of panels devoted to Goethe’s lyric poetry at the Thirty-first Conference of the German Studies Association in 2010. The organizers, including Regina Sachers, were motivated by the observation that this genre of Goethe’s writings has been surprisingly understudied in recent years. On the one hand, scholars have tended to revisit very similar questions raised by a comparatively small number of individual poems; only rarely have new contexts or innovative theoretical approaches been brought into play. On the other hand, David Wellbery’s magisterial study The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996) has been received with such appreciation that scholars seem to have been discouraged from pursuing new directions in this area of research. Our aim was to bring together a wide variety of established and emerging Goethe scholars and take stock of the current innovative approaches to Goethe’s lyric poetry. We are hopeful that the following articles, which (with one exception) have their origin in this panel series, will open up new avenues of research and poetic insight as they examine Goethe’s lyric through various discursive lenses and from different theoretical angles.

The first three contributions propose new ways of reading Goethe’s early poems that go beyond David Wellbery’s methodology and assessments. Edgar Landgraf, meeting David Wellbery on his home turf, makes a strong argument that the discursive formation of Goethe’s early poems is better understood if approached with a rigorous application of Luhmann’s systems theory. Christian Weber delineates metapoetic strategies in Goethe’s early poetry and argues that the arrangement of the “great hymns of genius” in the Erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung constitutes a dimension of poetic meaning that cannot be captured by the common approach of reading poems as singular events. Joseph O’Neil’s reading of Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes vorstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung reviews David Wellbery’s notion of “specular romanticism.” As O’Neil argues, in this poem of his first Weimar years Goethe proclaims an alternative version of “poetic vocation” based on distinction, mediation, and judgment instead of the imagined identity between the self and the cosmos that had been suggested as characteristic of his earlier poems.

Other articles gain new ground by activating new contexts. Reading Mignon’s “Kennst du das Land” both in its setting in Wilhelm Meisters [End Page 3] Lehrjahre and in the context of a theory of empathy, Fritz Breithaupt asks how this poem, despite thematizing a highly individual fate, can command universal appeal. Frauke Berndt and Claudia Maienborn draw on insights from linguistics, psychoanalysis, and rhetoric to argue that the “standard” reading of Auf dem See, which construes the “reifende Frucht” as a symbol of the maturing subject, is highly questionable; their proposed reading of the poem casts it as a “media event.” Daniel Wilson submits that the questions raised by Selige Sehnsucht are best answered by placing it in a series of Divan poems that talk about homosexuality. Benjamin Bennett argues that—in light of the “antipoetic” agenda of Faust—poetry can only relate to truth by enacting it; he carefully reads two poems (Dauer im Wechsel and Vermächtniß) to make visible the features of such an enactment. Via Goethe’s theory of science and American transcendentalism, Hannah Eldridge connects her analysis of the difficulties of comprehending the Divan poem Unbegrenzt to Stanley Cavell’s response to the problems of skepticism. And, intriguingly, starting with Unbegrenzt as well, Charlotte Lee finds that the Divan and Hegel’s speculative philosophy resonate with surprising similarities. [End Page 4]

Horst Lange
University of Central Arkansas
Christian P. Weber
Florida State University
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