Byron, Shelley, and Goethe's Faust: an Epic Connection by Ben Hewitt (review)

Ben Hewitt's book aims at 'something more' than a study of Goethe's influence on two British poets: an 'equilateral triangulation of the three poets' in which each has the 'right to vote on key ideas and concerns that they share with one another', and is seen 'commenting on, and at times providing a critique' of, the others. Hewitt's project is to draw out 'broader and deeper connections' between these three writers in particular and between 'British and German Romantic literature and theory more widely'. His method is 'ambitious, speculative, and suggestive', 'drawing on theory and philosophy for assistance in readings that stretch beyond what can be borne by historical, factual evidence', while taking into consideration historical evidence where this is available.

Hewitt sets up a theoretical opposition between epic and tragedy not only as literary genres but more importantly as 'conception[s] of human life'. A primary concern is the ways in which Goethe, Byron and Shelley all seek to push beyond tragedy's reading of human existence, and especially its 'understanding of the final limitedness of human potential', towards an 'epic' conception (as defined by Goethe's and Schiller's theories of epic and dramatic poetry) of human possibility, which encourages 'activity', 'disavows' tragic 'limitedness', and provokes 'political activity' in particular. Hewitt sees this process as beginning, ambiguously, in Faust I, then gaining greater momentum in Byron's Manfred, Cain and Don Juan, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and the second part of Faust.

Chapter 1 examines some of the ways in which critics, from the Romantic period to the present, have argued that Faust 'represents, with greater clarity and comprehensiveness than perhaps any other literary work, aspects of the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism, especially some of the discontents of this epochal shift'. The focus here is on Faust I, 'as its first Romantic audience, including Byron and Shelley', would have known Goethe's work. The emphasis is on how the play's representation of 'epochal' discontent is connected to its 'vexed relationship to tragedy and resistance to generic classification'. The chapter's first section focuses on the final scene of Faust I, 'Kerker', and its 'interplay' of irony and theology. The second section discusses Goethe's balancing of material and spiritual understandings of human experience and his 'argument' with Kant's 'proximity' to 'fatalism', 'Christian morality and ideas about free will'. The final section draws on the work of Franco Moretti and Lucien Goldmann to argue that Faust I 'contains elements of both tragic/dramatic and epic forms, combining the different, potentially radical effects of both'.

Chapter 2 shows that the 'politicization of Faust I' discussed in the first chapter 'was already underway during' Goethe's lifetime. De Staël's reading of Faust I and its influence on reviews and translations of the play in English are central here, alongside 'speculations about Coleridge's problems with Goethe' that allow Hewitt to relate British critical responses to the play to 'German controversies about pantheism and atheism' and other 'disputes and theoretical debates about poetry's relationship to other discourses, especially philosophy and theology'. Most important is the contemporary sense of Faust I's 'epic ambition' to be a poetry that encompasses all discourses, reducing 'religious ideas, among others, to the status of perspectives' on, rather than truths about, the 'temporal, phenomenal world' and dramatising 'the triumph of an ironic, doubting, basically un- or anti-christian view of human life'. It is this controversial Goethe, Hewitt argues, that so caught the attention of Byron and Shelley, who both developed 'a sense that Faust I was vitally important, containing within it the seeds of a new way of representing, and, perhaps, affecting the course of human history with poetry'.

Chapter 3 is on Byron. It discusses the two periods—the Geneva summer of 1816, and in 1822—during which, according to the 'critical consensus', Byron was most under the direct influence of Goethe...