Die Logik der Lyrik: Goethes Phänomenologie des Geistes in Gedichten. Teil 1, Die Genese des Genies by Christian P. Weber (review)

This monograph is the substantially revised and expanded version of the author’s dissertation. It presents a comprehensive study of Goethe’s early hymns—I follow Weber’s own nomenclature here (14n8)—as they were assembled by Goethe himself around 1777 in the unpublished “Erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung” (EWG). Weber argues that this collection not only contains the most authoritative versions of the poems but also is the result of a (more or less explicit) systematic plan with which Goethe attempted to bring into existence the poetic idea(l) that guided the formation (Bildung) of his poetic genius, with each poem simultaneously being a performative act and a self-reflection of the creative spirit. Weber’s study is divided into three parts: a theoretical-methodological examination of the logic of poetic production, an analysis of the intertextual allusions of the individual poems, and a reflection on the ensemble that lets the reader experience, in its intracontextual (“intra-kontextuell,” 146) constellation, the “pure phenomenon” of the poetic spirit.

Weber fleshes out how Goethe’s poems negotiate and accomplish the emergence of the poetic paradigm of autonomy—that is, the production and reception of literature based on a creative imagination that is freed from the theological and philosophical ideologies and institutions of the eighteenth century yet avoids the dangers of solipsistic excess. The “‘Vernünftigkeit’ oder Poeto-Logik” (15–16) of the creative spirit cannot be represented within the confines of a single poem but rather materializes only in the “metapoetics” of the EWG cycle, where the various poems taken together allow for reflection on the promises and limits of autonomous production. Weber argues that the cycle presents Goethe’s own version of a poetic Critique of the Imagination as complement to Kant’s work and precursor to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a poetic critique that escapes discursive thought and rational cognition. Poetry actively materializes products that are individual moments of the poetic spirit, a spirit whose essence can be aesthetically experienced, hermeneutically achieved, and intuitively accessed only in the ensemble of a poetic cycle. The unavoidable circularity of a spirit producing individual poems under the auspices of an overarching poetic idea that is only truly accessible after the individual texts have been collected into a larger ensemble is, according to Weber, itself an essential aspect of the project and establishes a never-ending adjustment of the relation between the particular and the universal that results in the ever-new production of more poems, leading to more reflection, more poems, and so on.

The study argues that each poem (re-)presents a necessary step in which the budding author projects certain aspects of his imagination onto poetic roles in order to exorcize (“austreiben,” 58) his inner demons, the inevitable conflicts of world and imagination. Weber finds the aesthetic idea governing this poetic production articulated in Goethe’s writings on the Strasbourg Cathedral, particularly the unfinished west façade, whose imaginary wholeness in the plans of the architect Erwin von Steinbach serves as a blueprint for the succession of the eleven poems of the EWG. Weber analyzes the poems in the order of the EWG: “Mahomets Gesang,” “Wandrers Sturmlied,” “Künstlers Morgenlied,” “An Schwager Kronos,” “Prometheus,” “Ganymed,” “Menschengefühl,” “Eislebens Lied,” “Königlich Gebet,” “Seefahrt,” “Der Wandrer.” He shows how, within the framing of the first poem’s prefiguration of the poetic process and of the last poem’s postreflection on the ruins of the spirit’s products (i.e., the cycle itself), the poems depict and negotiate the progressive liberation of poetic production and imagination from the constraints of the ideological regimes of mythology and Christianity, respectively. Weber sees the main antagonist of the first three poems as Zeus/Jupiter, whose reign the lyric speakers try to overcome through increasing identifications with the sun god Apollo. The second set of texts, from “Prometheus” to “Seefahrt,” reworks the...