Between the Muse and the Unconscious, the Poet in Crisis

By Julian Scutts, Student

Why the excessive use of the word "Wanderer" in 18th-Century Poetry?

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

WANDERING OR THE (POET'S) QUEST FOR ORIGINS, LIBERTY AND SELF-DISCOVERY

1. A basic Implication of the Verbs "to wander" and "wandern“

The German verb "wandern" and the English verb "to wander" are not necessarily identical in meaning, in as far as meanings can be indicated by lexical definitions, but they do often imply that when wandering, a person walks or travels without having a fixed goal, or at least one that this wanderer is able to reach at an appointed time. In such terms we may speak of Ulysses and the Israelites under the leadership of Moses as "wanderers". The wanderer's lack of a fixed timetable often carries with it the implication that he or she enjoys freedom of movement, indeed freedom itself. Such freedom may well involve exposure to dangers, whether physical, moral or psychological in nature, hence a need for guidance and tutelage. The necessary guidance may come from the experience of wandering itself, as the wanderer, in order to survive, gains self-knowledge, and this in turn involves a growing awareness of the wanderer's origins and original purposes. In as far as "wandering" can be recognised as a literary phenomenon, this General outline takes on a fresh aspect with the coming of a new historical Period. In one regard at least, there is no difficulty in locating appearances of this phenomenon, if one considers the implication of the word "to wander" within its textual setting. In Milton's works the word “wander“ often carries a signification that is to be understood within a theological frame, as when it concerns Man's moral freedom, the Fall and the path to Redemption.


Goethe's "Speech on Shakespeare's Day"(1771)

The age on which this study is focussed formally began in 1771, when Goethe published his "Speech on Shakespeare's Day" ("Rede zu Shakespears Tag"). The speech itself is perhaps no great work of art but rather an adolescent verbal outburst pleading for a break with neo-Aristotelian rules regarding the writing of dramatic works. The lasting significance of the “Speech“ lies not in its polemical message, for Goethe later submitted some of his plays to the principles laid down by Aristotle. It lay rather in the semiotic effect of a word contained in the “Speech“, namely "Wanderer", in a sentence describing Shakespeare as "the greatest Wanderer" ("der größte Wandrer"). Basic associations in the Essay underlie some of his later works. Shakespeare was Goethe's "friend and companion" through life according to his poem "Zwischen beiden Welten" ("Between both Worlds"), which names "William" and "Lida" (a reference to Frau von Stein) as those who exerted the greatest influence on his development as a poet.

His novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre records the wanderings of the chief protagonist, an actor with a great love of Shakespearean drama. In order to understand the word's significance and later impact we must consider more than the one unambiguous meaning one normally expects to find in words encountered in the reading of non-poetic prose. Shakespeare is called "the greatest Wanderer" on the basis of Goethe's recognition of the sheer scope and range of Shakespeare's imagination. Here the word "Wanderer" makes no reference to a physical act, nor is it necessarily a Metaphor based on an image presenting the picture of a person or thing in motion. Such a figure is depicted elsewhere in the “Speech“ in the image of a giant bestriding the globe. In common speech metaphors usually support, illuminate or add colour to the message being conveyed without detracting from this message itself. The image in this case occupies centre stage and totally overshadows the point it is ostensibly meant to clarify. The giant has a dual identity achieved by references to Prometheus and a giant in seven-league boots as depicted in folk-tales and fairy stories. Goethe's reference to Prometheus recalls the mythical titan, both as the creator of mankind, therefore a fitting symbol of artistic originality, and as the rebel seeking freedom from the oppressive rule of Zeus, reflecting a desire for greater liberty in the realms of politics, society and the arts. The reference to the folkloric giant reflects Goethe's newly awakened enthusiasm for poetry based on a long orally transmitted tradition. This awareness, like Goethe's discovery of Shakespeare, is attributable to an influence emanating from Johann Gottfried Herder, then a close friend of Goethe. Herder had been compiling examples of ancient ballads, not only German but also English, Scottish, Scandinavian and others. Herder's interest in this material was engendered by the impulse provided by Thomas Percy's Reliques and Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition.
In short, the word "Wanderer" forms the nexus of multiple references and images contained in the essay and thus gains a supercharged meaning or value in much the same way that words in poetry do. There is a further implication of the word "Wanderer" to consider. The immediate circle of those who first heard or read the “Speech“ recognised in the word "Wanderer" a reference to Goethe himself, celebrated for his habit of taking long walks. The word "Wanderer" poses a nodal reference connecting "Shakespeare", in the "Speech" the epitome of the poetic genius , with Goethe himself, not in some abstract sense but as a living person This fusion of identities carries very profound implications concerning the nature of the modern poet's identity and self-understanding, for unlike earlier poets, the modern poet has no comforting assumptions about the guidance of the Heavenly Muse. I recall the basic definition of "Wandering" outlined in the first paragraph of this chapter section. Goethe was evidently one of the first poets to recognise the dilemma of the modern poet in an age when assumptions concerning inspiration, the sanctity of language, the relation of time and eternity no longer accorded with the spirit of a new secular age. In the terms presented in Goethe's "Speech", the "Wanderer" refers both to a principle informing poetry, Shakespeare's dramatic genius, and to Goethe - a poet and also a full-blooded human being. In ages when a religious outlook had prevailed, the Muse was understood to be the creative force working in or through the poet. As the relationship between Muse and poet was thought to be supernatural in nature, poets did not need to spend time sorting out their ideas about the Poet-Muse relationship. They first dedicated their work to the Muse and then felt free to get on with the job of composing poetry.

However mysterious the Muse was believed to be, this being was evidently perceived as one that had human attributes, allowing the poets to think of themselves as junior partners in a personal relationship. The modern poet has no such assurance. Is the "Wanderer" a process, a mode of creativity, or is he/she/it a personality? In the one case, the poet and poetry are taken to be impersonal, and indeed certain modern critics like Northrop Frye (Fables of Identity)6 assume that they are. If there is thought to be a close identity uniting the "wandering" principle and "the poet" in a biological and biographical sense, poets are likely to enjoy - and endure - feelings of intoxication alternating with those of horrific isolation, as manifested in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Goethe contended with the threat and challenge posed by his Wander-Poet equation by dramatising and allegorising the figure of the Wanderer in such a way as to interpose a healthy distance between the Wanderer as depicted in poetry and himself as the "Wanderer". Goethe and the Romantic poets were thrown back on their last resource, language itself, and only in their wandering in the medium of language could they discover and recognise whatever should assume the rôle once ascribed to the Muse and the poet's prophetic mission.
Geoffrey H. Hartman paints a very similar picture of the modern poet's situation in an essay entitled "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'",7 an article primarily concerned with the English Romantic poets. He suggests that the Romantic poets adopted the term "Wanderer" as an Epithet for themselves. Here is further evidence that the word "Wanderer", in poetic language at least, transcends the divide that otherwise distinguishes English from German. I conclude therefore that Goethe was the first to formulate the equation making the Wanderer a Synonym for the Poet and this equation, along with its basic implication, was recognised and adopted by the Romantic poets in the German-speaking world and, in less obvious ways, in England.

3. Inter-cultural Influences affecting German and English Literature from 1760 to 1830

To evaluate such a possibility it is necessary to recognise the cross-cultural influences that pertained during a period stretching from about 1760 to the early 19th century. From 1760 until about 1780 the flow of influence ran from Britain to the German area. Some indication of this trend is evident in the " Speech". There are traces of influence from British sources in works written by Goethe shortly after the appearance of "the Speech on Shakespeare's Day". Goethe's early poems and his novelle Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) also show strong traces of influence flowing from the British Isles. Werther, a proto-romantic doomed hero records in his journal his enjoyment of readings in Homer. However, he later records a change of reading matter when he becomes absorbed in James Macpherson's Ossian with its evocation of a wild and remote Celtic past. He renders a line from the Macpherson's "translation" of some supposedly original source in Gaelic as "Der Wanderer wird kommen" - ("Tomorrow shall the traveller come"). Goethe later commented that this change coincided with the juncture at which Werther began his descent towards total social isolation and self-destruction. Goethe's knowledge of Goldsmith's The Traveller leaves its mark in "Der Wandrer" of 1771, a poetic dialogue between a cultural tourist exploring the sites of ancient classical temples in southern Italy and a young woman occupying a cottage in this region.
Though the winds of influence blew eastwards in the 1760s and 1770s, they certainly changed direction in the 1790s, when works by Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and August Bürger excited great interest in English literary circles. I refer again to the fact that William Wordsworth had read "The Wanderer", a translation of Goethe's "Der Wandrer" in 1798. Wordsworth's use of the term "Wanderer" in The Excursion suggests much more than the importation of a word into his poetic vocabulary, for it implies that Wordsworth, and probably other English Romantic poets, understood the nature of Goethe's equation of Poet-Wanderer. The English poets may also have recalled occurrences of such words as “Wanderer“ and “wander“ in the works of Shakespeare and Milton. I later investigate this intermingling of influences when discussing “I wandered lonely as a cloud“. In this we shall contrast old and new meanings of the verb "to wander" in a blending of influences revealing the power of language to conserve old meanings and generate new ones. How language can do this will be focused on in the next chapter.

4. Mythology/ Religious allegory/ Poetics

Common Areas of Concern reflected in German and English Texts containing "to wander" or "wandern"

It may prove instructive to consider in what ways the greatest "Wanderer" himself applied the verb to "wander". In A Midsummer Night's Dream Puck refers to himself as "that merry wanderer of the night", anticipating the juxtaposition of "Wanderer" and "Nacht" in Goethe's poetry. As noted earlier, Professor Willoughby detects in the verbal juxtaposition associating "Wanderer" and "Hütte" evidence of the operations of the unconscious mind, which, according to C.G. Jung, underlie ancient myths representing the sun (a symbol of the libidinal urge) journeying through the night in an attempt to achieve union with the "anima", the female aspect of the self. Professor Willoughby also asserts that Goethe pioneered the discovery of the unconscious. The final lines of Faust Part II end with a notable reference to "das ewig Weibliche", "the eternally female". According to Professor Willoughby and other scholars, inadvertent verbal juxtapositions in a text reflect the operations of unconscious mental processes. However, not all symbolic journeys are only "mythical" in quality. There is also a historical aspect to consider. As Professor Willoughby also points out, the "Wanderer"-"Hütte" juxtapositions find a precedent in the biblical Festival of Tabernacles when the Israelites dwelt in provisional "huts" or booths. The story of the wandering Israelites posed in Dante's view the primal allegory in the Christian tradition. The biblical festival arguably expresses a need to establish a connection between astral time (with its circular structure) and historical time (with its progressive attribute). Some other biblical or classical motifs are identified as the “Wanderer“ in both English and German, in particular Cain, a figure which Professor Willoughby singles out as a particularly important motif in Goethe's poetry and prose works. It is very difficult for post-Romantic theorists to hold together two distinct but by no means mutually antagonistic attitudes to time and time-consciousness - mythical or cyclical time, and historic or progressive time.
Whatever one believes about the religious orthodoxy - or more often the lack of it - on the part of Goethe and the Romantic poets, these poets all felt the need to avail themselves of images and allegorical elements derived from biblical or other religious source-material typically recalled by the word "Wanderer". Indeed, the question of the religious or essentially non-religious aspects of modern poetry poses a major point of contention among literary critics. The word "to wander" plays a key role in critical discussions concerning the status of poetry in the modern secular world (Ch.3).

Goethe and his Romantic contemporaries did not share one religious point of view and yet they all availed themselves of biblical allegories and other religious imagery. I think they did so because they found that the use of the allegorical mode of expression "worked", that is to say, it got them over the same obstacle, their lacking assurance about the identity of the Poet / Wanderer and the nature of their source of inspiration in an age when it was too late to presume a belief in direct inspiration and too early to appeal to the theories of Jung and Freud. The main problems facing the poets of the Romantic era remain essentially those confronting critics at the end of the twentieth century, though some have assumed a very authoritative, sometimes almost authoritarian, pose. If, to refer to T.E. Hulme's dictum, Romantic poetry is "spilt religion",7 modern criticism is sometimes open to the criticism that it is spilt theology. In T.E. Hulme’s words:
You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism, then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.



5. The Recurrence of a Key Word in a) Single Works b) Works by the same
Author c) Poetic Tradition, - The Relevance of a "Logocentric" Method?

In what way is this discussion of the word "Wanderer" relevant to the tasks of interpreting individual works of literature? Not all schools of criticism favour comparisons between identical or similar words situated in different poetic works. Proponents of the internal school regard each
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work as a distinct poetic object that fuses all composite elements into a unique construct. In their view a word (image, symbol) acquires significance only as part of the unity suffusing the work. Other poems may contain words sharing the same outward form, but their function and attributes participate in a totally different system. Critics adhering to this school, emphasise the unique and spontaneous qualities of the work, and so tend to regard words, with what they see as their limited range of lexical meanings, as a source of raw material like the sculptor's stone or painter's oils.

b) For Professor Willoughby the context that provides a basis for a comparing poems written by Goethe is that derived from a knowledge of Goethe's personality and the course of his life. Professor Willoughby does not venture into comparisons between Goethe's poetry and that of the German Romantic poets, although these also, being subject to Goethe's influence, frequently contain the word "Wanderer" and other derivatives of the verb "wandern". A study in which a critic compares works written by more than one author cannot be based on the assumption that these works are the product of the same mind, as in Willoughby's study of the "Wanderer" image in Goethe's poetry, and it is not possible to bypass this problem by claiming that the Romantics simply adopted Goethe's formulations "lock, stock and barrel", that is to say, accepting the entire system of values they imply in Goethe's literary works. As subsequent discussions will demonstrate, they were very much at variance with Goethe's concept of the Wanderer's (artist's or poet's) rôle in society, but they did not choose another word with which to confute Goethe's values but used the word they had appropriated from Goethe to do so. The word then lies at the heart of a dialogue between poets whose most important differences emerge once they recognise their essential affinities. Family arguments are not the least heated of disputes. G. H. Hartman contends that the figure of the Wanderer translated into such characters as Coleridge’s Mariner and Goethe’s Faust articulates a fundamental change of consciousness to which poets of the Romantic generation were subject.8 Such a momentous change can only be recognised as change in relief. i.e. against a cultural and historical background, and, in the literary domain, within the ambit of all that T.S. Eliot meant by the unity of literary tradition. Hence the need for an approach that involves the possibility of interpreting occurrences of words within a wider historical or "diachronic" context

c) . According to the Russian Formalist Jurij Tynjanov, (9)a word has both a universal and specific aspect if one allows that the specific position of a word within a literary text helps to determine its role in a continuing process, whether evident in the particular work in question, in the author's life or in poetic tradition itself. We have already noted that the appearance of the word "Wanderer" in the "Speech on Shakespeare's Day" marks the beginning of a new age in poetry, which is not to say that the word acquired a meaning in no way related to implications that it had earlier possessed, for in both German and English, words derived from the wander- root had referred to some source of inspiration. In the English tradition this assumed the aspect of "wandering Muse", and in the German tradition "the Wanderer" had been the epithet applied to Wotan, a Germanic god of poetry and weather. The word acquired a new meaning consonant with the poet's consciousness of the contemorary world around him but did not at the same time lose the wealth of associations it had acquired before that time.








ANNOTATIONS

1. Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, (New York and Evanston, 1969).

2. The second hermeneutic principle of rabbinical exegesis (Rabbi Yishmael's baraisa) is based on the premise that a word is imbued with a divinely bestowed meaning that transcends any particular context. Texts and passages in the Bible that contain the same word are compared on the basis of this premise.

3. L.A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry", (Etudes Germaniques, 3, Autumn 1951).

4. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'" Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970).

5. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin University of Texas Press, 1981).

6. Northrop Frye, Fables of Indentity, (New York, 1963).

7. T.E. Hulme, Romanticism and Classicism, in Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 1924.

8. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’“.




9. Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse", in Readings in Russian Poetics,Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska (Michigan Slavic Publications,Ann Arbor, 1978), p.79-80. pp. 136-145.