Beyond the Poem: Strategies of Metapoetic Reflection in Goethe’s Erster Weimarer Gedichtsammlung

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.¹ 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.² 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.

Readings that attempt to carve out in detail the implications of Goethe’s poetic arrangements focus exclusively on prominent pairings such as the one above, on groupings and rubrics that have been named by the author (for example “Elegien I,” later renamed “Römische Elegien,” and “Elegien II” in the Neue Schriften of 1800), or on rubrics that were arranged especially for the Ausgabe letzter Hand, such as “Trilogie der Leidenschaften” and “Gott und Welt.” Especially in later years, Goethe’s poetic production appears to be guided, even pre-informed, by generic forms and integral themes, as in the cycles of “Sonette” and the West-östliche Divan.³ In contrast, the poetic production of “young Goethe” is widely considered the epitome of spontaneously inspired Erlebnislyrik, and consequently his early poems are commonly regarded as momentous and autonomous poetic entities.

However, it is worth noting that, as early as 1767, Goethe compiled and ordered his poems in the book Annette. Two years later, in a letter to Langer, he describes the grouping of Neue Lieder as “die Geschichte meines Herzens in kleinen Gemälden!”⁴ Moreover, Goethe was highly selective about the type of poems he submitted to specific journals.⁵ For example, he published most of the love poetry inspired by his Friederike- and Lili-episodes in Friedrich Jacobi’s Iris, Zeitschrift für Frauenzimmer in 1775. Many of his “avant-gardist” Sturm and Drang poems, however, remained unpublished during his youth, although Goethe had compiled them in the so-called Erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung (EWG) from 1777 or 1778.⁶ This collection is only transmitted in Goethe’s handwriting and consists of twenty-eight poems that are carefully arranged in a binder.⁷ As Karl Eibl remarks, the first eleven poems, which include most of the so-called hymns of genius such as “Mahomets Gesang,” “Wandrers Sturmlied,” “Prometheus,” and “Ganymed,” form “an ensemble of diverse speech-roles” that “virtually formulates a poetic program.”⁸ Owing to the individual prominence of these poems and the particularly elaborate relations they entertain with one another, I have selected this group for a case study that explores the strategies and poetic significance of what I call Goethe’s “metapoetics.” Based on this evidence, my argument aims to show that the planning of arrangements has informed the production process of Goethe’s lyric poetry at all times.

The Making of “Prometheus”: Intrapoetic Conflicts and Their Metapoetic Resolution

Before turning to the specifics of Goethe’s poetics of arrangement, it is necessary to describe what constitutes and drives his poetic process, if only to highlight to which larger “movement” metapoetical strategies belong to as well as to clarify the poetic terminology and to justify the unorthodox hermeneutic method employed by this article. (To...