Reality and Creative Vision in German Lyric Poetry by August ClossReview by: Victor LangeThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Jul., 1967), pp. 560-562Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3722181 .

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(p. 497). And Marcel Engel ('Im Morgenrot Herodots. Ernst Juinger und die Antike') quotes (p. 485) the following two typical reflections by Jiinger: Wenn ich meinen Stil bedenke, uiber den die Auguren streiten, so liegt das Eigentiimliche an ihm wohl darin, daB noch ein Teilchen der alten Bilderwelt in ihm lebendig ist, ein Tropfen heraklitischen Salbols; alles andere ist Schaum der Zeit. Dem Gegensatz von Hamann und Kant, von Goethe und Newton entspricht der zwischen Vico und Cartesius. Die Kraft dieser Geister beruht auf Offenbarung, nicht auf Erkenntnis, und auf der Sprache, nicht auf der Logik; ihr Stammvater ist Heraklit.

Thought, expression, creative organizing, self-encounter: these are here seen to be rooted in the Heraclitean Logos. POPPER

H. POPPER SWANSEA

Reality and Creative Vision in German Lyric Poetry. Edited by AUGUST CLOSS. London: Butterworth. I963. xiv + 234 pp. 40s.

This substantial collection of essays on various facets of German poetry will arouse the interest of the specialist as well as of those concerned with general issues of literary criticism. It is a record of the Fifteenth Symposium of the Colston Research Society that was arranged by Professor Closs and that brought together some fifty scholars from Europe and America who heard thirteen demanding papers and who seem, if the summary of the discussions is an indication, to have engaged in excellent shop talk. The range of topics and opinions is impressive: aspects of classical as well as modern German poetry are examined, biographical and historical perspectives are explored and the high level of seriousness is bound to assure our respect.

Yet we cannot quite help feeling that while the contributions illuminate diverse and important areas of German poetry, the volume as a whole offers merely a miscellany of respectable academic exercises (each useful, but often lacking in relevance to the common theme), which neither assume nor achieve a congruence of adequate critical principles. 'Reality' and 'creative vision' are tantalizing terms; if the proceedings were intended to clarify their elusive connotations or if the diversity of subject matter and of points of view was to have been put in focus by these concepts, the evidence before us is a little disappointing.

The symposium began well with Professor L. C. Knights's judicious reflections on the nature of the poetic process, and a reminder that the great poets, such as Coleridge or Valery, articulate and embody in their poetry 'modes of intellectual energy'. This proposition, carefully developed in the opening paper, could have provided a useful terminological premise. What Professor Schoolfield in a detailed examination of Rilke's 'Entwiirfe aus zwei Winterabenden' then suggests as to the blurring as well as illuminating effect of the poetic exercise upon autobiographical materials touches upon the main issue of the symposium without clearly deter- mining the relationship between 'fact' and 'vision', or between poetry and prose. If it is true, as Professor Schoolfield asserts, that a poet may be more 'direct' in poetry, and may 'hide and reveal himself at the same time', it might well be asked in what manner this ambiguous impulse determines his formal procedures.

An 'objective' kind of poetry which projects antithetical attitudes of mind and feeling is recognized in Professor W. D. Williams's discussion of 'Nietzsche and lyric poetry'. Nietzsche's 'Dionysos Dithyramben', he maintains, are, in a modern sense, non-representational: they offer 'linguistic constructs which create a whole

(p. 497). And Marcel Engel ('Im Morgenrot Herodots. Ernst Juinger und die Antike') quotes (p. 485) the following two typical reflections by Jiinger: Wenn ich meinen Stil bedenke, uiber den die Auguren streiten, so liegt das Eigentiimliche an ihm wohl darin, daB noch ein Teilchen der alten Bilderwelt in ihm lebendig ist, ein Tropfen heraklitischen Salbols; alles andere ist Schaum der Zeit. Dem Gegensatz von Hamann und Kant, von Goethe und Newton entspricht der zwischen Vico und Cartesius. Die Kraft dieser Geister beruht auf Offenbarung, nicht auf Erkenntnis, und auf der Sprache, nicht auf der Logik; ihr Stammvater ist Heraklit.

Thought, expression, creative organizing, self-encounter: these are here seen to be rooted in the Heraclitean Logos. POPPER

H. POPPER SWANSEA

Reality and Creative Vision in German Lyric Poetry. Edited by AUGUST CLOSS. London: Butterworth. I963. xiv + 234 pp. 40s.

This substantial collection of essays on various facets of German poetry will arouse the interest of the specialist as well as of those concerned with general issues of literary criticism. It is a record of the Fifteenth Symposium of the Colston Research Society that was arranged by Professor Closs and that brought together some fifty scholars from Europe and America who heard thirteen demanding papers and who seem, if the summary of the discussions is an indication, to have engaged in excellent shop talk. The range of topics and opinions is impressive: aspects of classical as well as modern German poetry are examined, biographical and historical perspectives are explored and the high level of seriousness is bound to assure our respect.

Yet we cannot quite help feeling that while the contributions illuminate diverse and important areas of German poetry, the volume as a whole offers merely a miscellany of respectable academic exercises (each useful, but often lacking in relevance to the common theme), which neither assume nor achieve a congruence of adequate critical principles. 'Reality' and 'creative vision' are tantalizing terms; if the proceedings were intended to clarify their elusive connotations or if the diversity of subject matter and of points of view was to have been put in focus by these concepts, the evidence before us is a little disappointing.

The symposium began well with Professor L. C. Knights's judicious reflections on the nature of the poetic process, and a reminder that the great poets, such as Coleridge or Valery, articulate and embody in their poetry 'modes of intellectual energy'. This proposition, carefully developed in the opening paper, could have provided a useful terminological premise. What Professor Schoolfield in a detailed examination of Rilke's 'Entwiirfe aus zwei Winterabenden' then suggests as to the blurring as well as illuminating effect of the poetic exercise upon autobiographical materials touches upon the main issue of the symposium without clearly deter- mining the relationship between 'fact' and 'vision', or between poetry and prose. If it is true, as Professor Schoolfield asserts, that a poet may be more 'direct' in poetry, and may 'hide and reveal himself at the same time', it might well be asked in what manner this ambiguous impulse determines his formal procedures.

An 'objective' kind of poetry which projects antithetical attitudes of mind and feeling is recognized in Professor W. D. Williams's discussion of 'Nietzsche and lyric poetry'. Nietzsche's 'Dionysos Dithyramben', he maintains, are, in a modern sense, non-representational: they offer 'linguistic constructs which create a whole

560 560 Reviews Reviews

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system of relationships not necessarily applicable to the real world'. In the best informed and most perceptive essay of this volume Professor Prawer applies the terms 'reality' and 'creative vision' to a central preoccupation of German poetry: the 'impassioned recognition of forces that bring ecstasy and terror and at whose existence language can only hint'. From Klopstock to the poets of our own time, he suggests, the experience of the 'numinous' and the 'uncanny' has provided a realm of meaning, a 'no-man's land between poetry, religion and psychology', of which it is possible to speak only in oblique and paradoxical images. Professor Prawer sketches something like a rhetoric, or grammar, of this awareness and concludes by reminding us of the double impact of the sublime and the grotesque, of awe and terror, that may bring us, through the poetic forms of any given period, to the limits of experience and cognition.

Professor Aler's wide-ranging discussion of 'Mythical consciousness in modern German poetry' strikes me as somewhat imprecise and therefore rather less profit- able: he postulates a 'mythical state of mind' and a 'solemn feeling for a living cosmic unity' but leaves the poetic forms conveying it undefined and only in passing refers to specific evidence in particular poets. He must therefore conclude with so problematical a statement as: 'Where in close harmony with nature, art aims to interpret essential patterns of living and presents these typical situations to us with a profound and/or monumental simplification in concrete symbols, there mythical consciousness shows itself, without traditional myths, yet closely associated with the "ever-mythical", most up-to-date.'

More than once the readers of these papers will wish that Professor Peacock's sober examination of 'Factors in literary judgment' should have been required preliminary reading for the participants. Instead of such critical pseudo-categories as 'universality', 'vision of eternal forms', 'higher reality', or 'creativeness', Peacock urges three comprehensive criteria for defining and evaluating the literary object: the idea of organic textural unity, the quality of philosophical awareness, and the element of novelty. It is a pity that these concepts, however much in need of further refinement, do not appear to have aroused the participants to a clarifying sort of debate.

It is in some of the contributions devoted to particular poets or poetic forms that the central topic emerges as productive and challenging. It is true that Profes- sor Mainland's discussion of 'Brockes and the limitations of imitation', and Profes- sor Garland's 'Schiller the revisionist - the poet's second thoughts' are solid studies in their own terms; but they strike one as having little more than tangential connexion with the issue put before the Symposium. More to the point is a somewhat involved paper of Professor B6ckmann's which addresses itself to an issue mid-way between poetics and literary history. B6ckmann investigates the progression of German hymnic verse from Klopstock's enthusiastic celebration of God as the creator and of nature as his instrument, to those later hymns that address themselves to an all-sustaining but secularized nature and that require in the poet either concrete scientific perception or an intense subjective feeling. In Holderlin's hymns neither God the creator nor any pantheistic union of God and world is the intended object of praise. Holderlin is less concerned with the apostrophe of any palpable objective reality than with evoking and naming what is real in the relation of the self to its world. Such a precarious relationship produces H6lderlin's 'interlocutory laments'- forms of poetry which elaborate, different from the Goethean poetry of experience but much like modern symbolist verse, a self-contained intellectual system.

To insist on the hermetic character of modern writing is, of course, appropriate enough; and to this significant feature of contemporary German poetry two elaborate essays direct their attention: Professor B. Allemann (with sympathy) in a

36

Reviews 56I

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discussion of non-representational poetry, and Professor Gloss (in a more negative or at least melancholy key) in 'Concealment and revelation in modern German lyrical poetry', the address that concludes the symposium. The first is a circumspect survey of the various formal means by which the structural coherence and integrity of the contemporary 'abstract' poem is maintained beyond the 'figurative character' of earlier poetic speech. Allemann has elsewhere (Definitions, ed. A. Frise, 1963) expanded this sensible paper which, one gathers, elicited a livelier debate than any of the other papers, except perhaps that following Dr Salinger's reflections on translating lyric poetry.

Professor Gloss has for long been a wise reader and interpreter and an unfailing chronicler of German poetry. In the present instance his dejection at the spirit of the age, and a certain metaphysical predisposition seem to override his critical judg- ment. He may well be right to deplore the 'predominantly cerebral' nature of much contemporary German poetry; yet, it is not quite enough to suggest that this is due to the poet's failure to create 'from the deep recesses of his spiritual inwardness' and his inability to open before us 'the depths of man's soul, an intangible Reality which is vaster and deeper than ever imagined on the ordinary level of human experience'. The terminology suggests a notion of 'reality' that can only produce poetic statements beyond all critical judgment, and, in any case, assumes a division in our aesthetic perception between emotional and intellectual resources that modern criticism will not easily accept. When Professor Gloss argues that 'the plunge into abstraction destroys our total feeling towards life and its sense of mystery, as soon as cold science has thrown its searching light into the vast silences of Nature' he speaks in splendid but, I fear, critically unrewarding images. Most of the poets he examines must therefore appear as 'mere' verbal prestidigitators engaged in 'intellectual experiment' (Celan), 'feats of mechanical engineering technique' (Gomringer), 'satirical absurdities' (Grass), or an 'arbitrary montage technique' (Heissenbiittel). Does it do justice to Ingeborg Bachmann's or Celan's intention to say that 'the mystery of love often remains concealed behind sneering indifference or ingenious puzzles?' Professor Gloss, whose faith in the sustaining power of poetry has so often been demonstrated and who brought about this memorable meeting of distinguished scholars, would be the first to admit that his conclusions unduly simplify an immensely complicated historical situation. If 'creative vision' is to be regarded as a constituent element in the making of poetry, it must include the whole impressive range of perspectives and devices by which the contemporary writer gives an account of his understanding of 'reality' that is no less articulate and telling than that of his masters. V VICTOR LANGE PRINCETON

Albrecht von Haller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe und ihre NJachkommen. Ein familien- geschichtlicher Vergleich. By ERNST GRUNTHAL, assisted by M. A. BREIL and H. HAEBERLI. Francke: Bern. I965. I90 pp. 28 Sw.Fr.

This careful study of Haller and of Goethe is of limited interest only to the literary historian, but may appeal to him in his capacity as general reader with an interest in characterology and the psychological pattern of family relationships. The main part of the book is taken up with agreeably presented case-histories and potted biographies among which those of Haller himself, of Goethe's father and mother, and of Goethe's grandson, Wolfgang Maximilian, stand out as especially readable. The account of Haller's extraordinary universal genius and of his 'Alpenlast von

discussion of non-representational poetry, and Professor Gloss (in a more negative or at least melancholy key) in 'Concealment and revelation in modern German lyrical poetry', the address that concludes the symposium. The first is a circumspect survey of the various formal means by which the structural coherence and integrity of the contemporary 'abstract' poem is maintained beyond the 'figurative character' of earlier poetic speech. Allemann has elsewhere (Definitions, ed. A. Frise, 1963) expanded this sensible paper which, one gathers, elicited a livelier debate than any of the other papers, except perhaps that following Dr Salinger's reflections on translating lyric poetry.

Professor Gloss has for long been a wise reader and interpreter and an unfailing chronicler of German poetry. In the present instance his dejection at the spirit of the age, and a certain metaphysical predisposition seem to override his critical judg- ment. He may well be right to deplore the 'predominantly cerebral' nature of much contemporary German poetry; yet, it is not quite enough to suggest that this is due to the poet's failure to create 'from the deep recesses of his spiritual inwardness' and his inability to open before us 'the depths of man's soul, an intangible Reality which is vaster and deeper than ever imagined on the ordinary level of human experience'. The terminology suggests a notion of 'reality' that can only produce poetic statements beyond all critical judgment, and, in any case, assumes a division in our aesthetic perception between emotional and intellectual resources that modern criticism will not easily accept. When Professor Gloss argues that 'the plunge into abstraction destroys our total feeling towards life and its sense of mystery, as soon as cold science has thrown its searching light into the vast silences of Nature' he speaks in splendid but, I fear, critically unrewarding images. Most of the poets he examines must therefore appear as 'mere' verbal prestidigitators engaged in 'intellectual experiment' (Celan), 'feats of mechanical engineering technique' (Gomringer), 'satirical absurdities' (Grass), or an 'arbitrary montage technique' (Heissenbiittel). Does it do justice to Ingeborg Bachmann's or Celan's intention to say that 'the mystery of love often remains concealed behind sneering indifference or ingenious puzzles?' Professor Gloss, whose faith in the sustaining power of poetry has so often been demonstrated and who brought about this memorable meeting of distinguished scholars, would be the first to admit that his conclusions unduly simplify an immensely complicated historical situation. If 'creative vision' is to be regarded as a constituent element in the making of poetry, it must include the whole impressive range of perspectives and devices by which the contemporary writer gives an account of his understanding of 'reality' that is no less articulate and telling than that of his masters. V VICTOR LANGE PRINCETON

Albrecht von Haller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe und ihre NJachkommen. Ein familien- geschichtlicher Vergleich. By ERNST GRUNTHAL, assisted by M. A. BREIL and H. HAEBERLI. Francke: Bern. I965. I90 pp. 28 Sw.Fr.

This careful study of Haller and of Goethe is of limited interest only to the literary historian, but may appeal to him in his capacity as general reader with an interest in characterology and the psychological pattern of family relationships. The main part of the book is taken up with agreeably presented case-histories and potted biographies among which those of Haller himself, of Goethe's father and mother, and of Goethe's grandson, Wolfgang Maximilian, stand out as especially readable. The account of Haller's extraordinary universal genius and of his 'Alpenlast von

562 562 Reviews Reviews

This content downloaded from 193.105.245.57 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:32:38 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions