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

In the introduction, the editors declare that they pursued a “programmatic intention” when they organized the conference in Weimar that resulted in the nineteen contributions to this formidable anthology: “So tritt an die Stelle der lange Zeit geltenden linear-teleologischen Konstruktion von Goethes Werk im Allgemeinen wie seiner Liebeslyrik im Besonderen die entschiedene Akzentuierung einer synchronen Vielfalt der Formen, Töne und Inhalte, einer Polyphonie in allen Schaffensphasen, in allen Gedichtzyklen, ja teils auch in einzelnen Gedichten. Nicht lineare, gar epochenübergreifende Entwicklungslinien bestimmen aus Sicht der in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge Goethes Liebeslyrik, sondern vielmehr experimentelle Anordnungen, Muster, die konstellativ erprobt werden, abhängig auch vom jeweiligen kultur-, werk- und lebensgeschichtlichen Kontext” (16). Love is defined here as “ein ‘Glück’ der Vielstimmigkeit” (16–17), and poetry, as a genuinely polyphonic medium, gives voice to this happy event in a coincidental symbolic happening of words. However, no single poem can represent love fully; it usually captures only a certain aspect or moment of this most complex phenomenon. Because of its endless versatility and inexhaustible recurrence, love will always remain poetry’s favorite topic. Yet a poem can do justice to the great depth and range of love’s emotions, at least to a certain degree, when it forms part of a lyrical cycle. Here, the concerted interactions between these many intimate moments coalesce into a more complete and complex image of one love episode.

Based on this principal understanding of the relationship between love and poetry, it is possible to identify several types of tension that find articulation in Goethe’s love poetry and form the basis of his poetics. First, as in every love poem, there is an intrinsic conflict between the “I” and the “You,” between the male genius who expresses his love poetically and a female beloved who embodies the stimulating aesthetic object of desire and the recipient of his poetry. Often, this relationship is further enhanced by a reflection on nature, in which the lyrical I recognizes an equally poetic force and which impresses him aesthetically as much as he hopes to impress the beloved by means of the poem. The moment of his lyrical creativity lasts as long as the poetic and aesthetic forces mutually reinforce each other and maintain a state of harmonious balance, for which “Maifest” provides the paradigmatic example. Yet when this relationship is disturbed, for instance, when the female beloved expresses her own individuality and therefore no longer corresponds to but competes with that of the lover, the lyrical I experiences an existential crisis that leads to a crisis of poetic production, as shown in the poem “Lilis Park.”

Except for David Wellbery’s contribution, no chapter in this volume reflects on the dynamic relationship between the poetic lyrical I and the mimetic lyrical You in terms of its poetological consequences. Instead, many contributors are (once again) more concerned with the status of the lyrical I as a poetic persona and stand-in for the empirical author. In this vein, Jan Röhnert argues that Goethe created love poetry in order to “objectify” his amorous experiences and to come to terms with his emotions. Röhnert’s contribution reconsiders the poet’s relationships with Friederike and Lili as “Episoden in einem autobiographischen Diskurs der Liebe, der zum individuellen Bildungsroman des Ichs gehört und in diesem vor allem dessen emotionale Komponente verkörpert” (60). In fact, most contributions to this volume confirm this approach more or less explicitly by associating certain poetic traits with specific characteristics of Goethe’s love relations. The persistence of this paradigm is further reflected by the arrangement of the chapters in the chronological order of the poet’s biography.

A second important tension in Goethe’s love poetry results from the discrepancy between the drive to re-create the emotive force and “presence” of the original feeling through poetic expression and the opposite drive to attain a self-distancing position from which...