Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition Review

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(More customer reviews)In this account of the personal fictions devised by German Romantic poets and their descendants to enable writing, Brigitte Peucker argues that the celestial longings of the Romantic lyric are overborne by intimations about nearer sources of inspiration. What takes precedence is a buried site that is at once underworld and unconscious; and the descent top that natural origin proves at the same time to have been a descent through the literary tradition.
From the origins of this tradition the poet is also estranged by the mediation of intervening poets, especially Goethe, Novalis, and Holderlin, to whom Puecker devotes a first chapter. This and the ensuing four chapters argue that what the lyric descent in this tradition always encounters and fails to transmute is the organicism of Goethe. Joseph von Eichendorff subtly criticizes Novalis for having failed to rid himself of Goethe's influence by having merely inverted its terms, but Eichendorff's preoccupation with "voices in the ground" shows that he continues to wrestle with the same alternatives. Identifying myths of transcendence with the male literary tradition, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff turns back to the world of natural process, discovering a daemonic figure of her poetic self in that world, only to find Goethe there before her.
Holderlin's revisinary view of Goethe as an emblem of both ascent and descent - as patriarch and child of nature - becomes exemplary for modern poets, so much so that he rather than Goethe becomes the chief ancestral rival of Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. Especially in the Sonnets to Opheus, Rilke identifies the subterranean voice of Orpeus-Holderlin with Goethean organicism and celebrates writing by contrast as a medium detached from all originary determinacies. Trakl understands the language of lyric to be overburdened with accumulated meanings, and empties it of its content in order to recover a "pure language" - a nonreferential state of nature which then becomes, ironically, still another version of organic immediacy.
--- from book's dustjacket

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