Poetry As a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century by Gabriel Trop (review)

Novalis, in a short poetological text entitled “Poesie,” remarks: “und wenn die Philosophie durch ihre Gesetzgebung die Welt erst zu dem wirksamen Einfluß der Ideen bereitet, so ist gleichsam Poesie der Schlüssel der Philosophie, ihr Zweck und ihre Bedeutung” (Werke, ed. Schulz, Munich 2001, 378). The philosophy–poetry relationship works both ways in Gabriel Trop’s Poetry as a Way of Life, a study of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Anacreontic texts: theory leads to an understanding of poetry as an aesthetic and cognitive exercise and conversely poetry corroborates poetological and philosophical observations that led to a practice of what Trop calls “art as a form of askesis” (26). Poetry, like all artistic expressions of human experience, becomes in this view a sustained practice through which form is given to the sensuous. Simultaneously, Trop warns us, “there is nothing so deadly” (208) as to understand art merely as an attempt to represent the unrepresentable. His approach to German poetry of the eighteenth century thus insists on interpreting poetry in spite of its seeming unintelligibility.

Trop’s study is organized in three parts, chronologically reversed, opening with some of Hölderlin’s poetological reflections (especially “Being, Judgment”), Hyperion, and three of his river poems (“The Rhine,” “The Ister,” and “Patmos”). The second part examines the disorganizing, yet also stimulating, effect of Novalis’s Hymns to the Night and The Novices of Sais, while the last part considers the “lightness, joy, and play” (19) of Anacreontic texts starting with Gottsched and Gleim, concluding with Goethe’s “Anacreon’s Grave” followed by the afterword. Each of the three parts is subdivided into three chapters and a conclusion. In an extensive study such as this one, effective organization is much appreciated. Furthermore, not only the individual parts, but also individual chapters can stand by themselves, allowing readers to browse freely. Trop’s tendency to summarize important findings from previous chapters in light of new contexts make this study highly usable to readers with diverse interests in specific texts or authors. However, one might want to consider the introduction and the first chapter thoroughly; here, the main direction and purpose of the study are explained.

Trop grounds his approach in Baumgarten, who considers aesthetics “as a science of sensuous cognition,” or—in Trop’s words—as “the act of making present in the mind something that is absent to the senses” (326). With this, the fundamental ontological problem of artistic expressions comes into focus: since poetry, like all art, must be seen as an appearance of human activity in the world, can it reveal the necessity of life (cf. 118)? With Hölderlin, Trop explains that reality and possibility are inseparably linked to each other, since no thinkable possibility lies outside of reality. Yet necessity is reality as it ought to be. Here he relies on Kant’s notion of practical reason in order to describe the realm of reality and possibility (the sensual world) on the one hand, and the realm of necessity (the postulates of reason), which cannot be perceived by human cognition, on the other hand. This is where poetry derives its function: “Poetry activates a sustained cognitive process that attempts to digest the inedible world, a world that appears at first to manifest only signs of dis-harmony and violence, emptied out of possible redemptive content” (324). Still, Hölderlin’s poetry can make necessity appear to the reader (117–118). By means of aesthetic exercise, poetry creates a space in which both freedom and a divine order (necessity) can be reconciled. While order itself can never be made visible, poetry activates insinuations of the existence of some order and therefore makes it perceivable for human experience. Through (Hölderlin’s) poetry, “the mind is challenged to seek out not only its own integrity, but the integrity of the history and the world into which it has been born...