Classical Rhetoric and the German Poet

1620 to the Present - Study of Opitz, Burger and Eichendorff

Anna Carrdus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781900755023
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351199292
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"This study relates theory to the details of poetic practice. it presents Opitz, Burger and Aichendorff as representatives of their times and demonstrates how they adapt the classical arts to their particular talents and beliefs. All three poets are shown at work within a tradition flexible enough to persist even into the present. The author shows how the influence of rhetoric on German poetry did not vanish in the mid-18th century, as is widely supposed. The firts chapter briefly comapres theoretical statements by martin Opitz and the 20th century poet peter Ruhmkorf. it uses the comaprison to introduce two main arguments: thta classical rhetoric and poetics exert a persistent though constantly changing influence on the composition of german poetry; and that the theoretical precepts and natural talent are mutually interdependant. These arguments are developed through the examination of works by three German poets, taken from periods of major literary change. Opitz is representative of the Baroque, Burger of the ""Sturm and Drang"", and eichendorff of Romanticism. Three main chapters reconstruct the working method of each poet, applying his own theory and that of near contemporaries to detailed analysis of one of two of his poems. This procedure illustrates how each poet adapts rhetorical and poetic traditions to his own personal talent and to the literary preoccupations of his time."

Chapter 1
❖
The Relationship between Theory and Poetry

Ergreift der Mensch den Stift, schon wird er kategorisch. Das schreibende Subjekt bedient sich der Poetik, schmäht nicht das Regelwerk berechneter Ästhetik: das Werk aus hohlem Bauch bleibt meistens illusorisch.

(LUDWIG HARIG¹)

This study is concerned with how poetry is composed. It examines the practical relationship between theory and poetry, and argues that the relationship has persevered in complex and changing forms since codifications of practice were first recorded, in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics.² Later, far more comprehensive codifications were instrumental in the almost simultaneous birth of German theory and re-birth of German poetry at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

My argument originated in the chance noticing of a similarity between writings by two German poets widely separated in time, a similarity with ramifications that epitomize continuity and change in the theoretical tradition. Both Martin Opitz (1597-1639) and Peter Riihmkorf (1929— ) have produced theory intimately related to their own practice. In the Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (1624), Opitz writes that a poet ‘muß … von sinnreichen einfällen … sein’ (GW II/1, 349); the title of one of Riihmkorfs numerous essays on poetic composition, written in 1979, is ‘Einfallskunde’.³ In each instance, an ‘Einfall’ is an unbidden idea with immediate bearing on the practices of poetry.

Opitz and Riihmkorf both use the word ‘Einfall’ when discussing the interdependence of ars and natura. This perennial topic is crucial to the practical relationship between theory and poetry: ars refers to learned theoretical codifications and their application during composition, natura refers to talent and inspiration, and tends to cast doubt on the need for codified precepts. Horace, one of Opitz’s models, poses the question of the balance between ars and natura in the Ars Poetica, and presents art as the poet’s training: ‘Do good poems come by nature or by art? This is a common question. For my part, I don’t see what study can do without a rich vein of talent, nor what good can come of untrained genius. They need each other’s help and work together in friendship.’⁴ Opitz adapts Horace to his own time by advocating the appropriation of classical and renaissance precepts to the composition of vernacular poetry, and works within a tradition where poetics is distinct from rhetoric only in its precepts on metre, rhyme and certain genres or forms.⁵ His ‘sinnreiche einfälle’ can therefore be understood as the vernacular equivalent of ingenium, a word used by Horace and later current as a rhetorical term for natural aptitude or practical talent.⁶ Ingenium balances ars during each of the three rhetorical stages of composition: inventio (‘erfmdung … der dinge’), the discovery of subject-matter; dispositio (‘eintheilung der dinge’), the arrangement of subject-matter; and elocutio (‘worte’), the choice of style—as well as during the regulation of metre and rhyme (cf. GW II/1, 359). When Opitz paraphrases a further Horatian comment on the interdependence of ars and natura,⁷ he places ‘sinnreiche einfälle’ in a list of natural talents that counterbalance acquired skills (the term euphantasiōtos is mentioned by Quintilian, and describes the poet or orator who possesses the power of vivid imagination):⁸

Die worte vnd Syllaben in gewisse gesetze zue dringen/ vnd verse zue schreiben/ ist das allerwenigste was in einem Poeten zue suchen ist. Er muß euphantasidtos, von sinnreichen einfällen vnd erfmdungen sein/ muß ein grosses vnverzagtes gemiite haben/ muß hohe sachen bey sich erdencken können/ soll anders seine rede eine art kriegen/ vnd von der erden empor steigen. (GW II/1, 348-9)

Here, the relationship between ‘sinnreiche einfälle’ and ‘erfmdungen’ is confirmed. And they are distinct from the other natural attributes listed, including divine inspiration—suggested by the phrase ‘von der erden empor steigen’.

In the final chapter of the Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey, however, this configuration shifts slightly. With reference to the Platonic locus classicus on the balance between ars and natura: ‘He who comes to poetry’s door without the Muses’ madness, convinced that art will make him an adequate poet, is without fulfilment’,⁹ Opitz appears to argue that divine inspiration replaces practical talent. The role of ‘sinnreiche einfälle’ in the discovery of subject-matter and choice of words is assigned to divine fury: ‘Wo diese natürliche anregung ist/ welche Plato einen Göttlichen furor nennt…/ dürften weder erfmdung noch worte gesucht werden’ (GW II/1, 409). The higher power of divine inspiration eclipses the function of ‘sinnreiche einfälle’, and seems to tip the level Horatian balance between natura and ars in favour of natura. Yet balance is nevertheless maintained, since Opitz is arguing not that divine inspiration precludes the need for art, but that it alleviates the labours of art.

It is at first surprising that a twentieth-century poet should be preoccupied with these same issues. Yet, in 1979, Rühmkorf acknowledges that traditional poetics ‘hält… beinah ungebrochen an’ (‘Einfallskunde’, 97), while the very title of his essay announces a concern with ars and natura: ‘Einfallskunde’ translates approximately as ‘The art of unbidden ideas’. It contains an argument that runs through many of Rühmkorf’s theoretical writings, and is later developed into a repudiation of divine fury. In ‘Uber die Arbeit’,¹⁰ Rühmkorf implicitly takes issue with a passage from the Ion, where Plato suggests that divine fury renders art superfluous and says of poets: ‘god takes away their senses and uses them as servants, as he does divine prophets and seers, so that we who hear may realize that it is not these persons… who are the speakers of such valuable words, but god who speaks and expresses himself to us through them’ (Russell and Winterbottom, 43). The notion of the poet as inspired genius or prophet has coloured opinion of German poetry since the ‘Geniezeit’ and Romanticism, and appears, of course, to elevate the poet’s standing. But Rühmkorf drastically asserts that it is degrading: if poetry is a product of divine fury, the poet is a mere ‘Ghostwriter der Himmlischen’ (‘Über die Arbeit’, 28) and has little control over composition. Rühmkorf defends this notion by emphasizing the labours of poetry: ‘Ein halbwegs ernstzunehmendes Gedicht ist nämlich weder Augenblickssache noch nur Stunden- oder Tagewerk, sondern das Arbeitskondensat von etwa einem Zwölftel Jahr’ (‘Einfallskunde’, 105). A different focus on Plato from a different historical perspective undermines the Opitzian argument that natura alleviates the labours of the ars.

In an earlier essay, Rühmkorfs insistence on the labours of poetry was a plea for financial recognition.¹¹ In ‘Einfallskunde’, it is a plea for the recognition of art, and illuminates a ‘Verlangen nach etwas persönlichem System’ (98). This need was pre-empted for Opitz and his contemporaries by the vitality of a general theoretical system, but is emphasized by one of Rühmkorfs immediate predecessors, Gottfried Benn, in ‘Probleme der Lyrik’ (1951),¹² a work crucial to the post-war regeneration of German poetics and poetry. Riihmkorf acknowledges Benn’s term ‘Artistik’ (‘Einfallskunde’, 120), and redresses the balance between ars and natura through detailed analysis of the ‘Einfall’, the chief representative of natura in his essay Like Benn, Riihmkorf follows variations on the classical tradition pursued by another poet-theorist, Paul Valery Valéry maintained a radical attitude towards the ars while stressing that it remains essentially unchanged by time: ‘Cette besogne delicate n’a guère changé de moyens, ni de caractère depuis qu’il existe des poètes’.¹³ His minute observation of his own labours analyses the interdependence of art and nature, and produces a pragmatic redefinition of divine inspiration. In the essay ‘Au sujet d’Adonis’ (1920), divine inspiration is identical with natural talent in the literal sense of a gift (‘un don’)—the ‘Einfall’:

Les dieux, gracieusement, nous donnent pour rien tel premier vers; mais c’est à nous de façonner le second, qui doit consonner avec l’autre, et ne pas être indigne de son aîné surnaturel. Ce n’est pas trop de toutes les ressources de l’expérience et de l’esprit pour le rendre comparable au vers qui fut un don. (Œuvres, i. 482)

‘Einfälle’ have a mysterious force—Valéry describes himself elsewhere as ‘tout à coup saisi par un rythme qui s’imposait à moi’ (Œuvres, i. 1322); whether they are single lines, rhythms or single words that call for an answering rhyme,¹⁴ they play a decisive role in bringing poems into being. And, far from easing the labours of composition, they call forth the utmost expenditure of art. For the modern sensibility, the interdependence of natura and ars is more a question of confrontation than of balance.¹⁵

Rühmkorf’s personal system emerges not from the study of codified precepts, but from a series of observations and confrontations with ‘Einfälle’, mediated by recent theory. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, it bears a remarkable resemblance to the stages of composition which comprise the rhetorical ars—although the name of each ‘Entwicklungsphase’ reflects the mysterious vigour of the modern ‘Einfair. The first is ‘ANFÄLLE UND AUSSCHLÄGE’, a gathering of ‘Einfälle’ comparable to the discovery of subject-matter in inventio. During the second phase, ‘DIE KOMPOSITORISCHE VERKRAMPFUNG’, the gathered ‘Einfälle’ seek order in a process resembling dispositio, the arrangement of subject-matter. This is followed by a phase in which the ‘Einfälle’ find interconnection and resolution through the speech gestures of the developing poem: ‘SPASMOLYTISCHE ENTÄUSSERUNG’ is comparable to elocutio, the choice of words. Riihmkorf controls each phase of development, and adds a final one: ‘DEN SCHÖNEN ORIGINALSCHEIN’— applications of ‘Glanzlicht-extra auf die Naht- und Schwachstellen’ create the appearance of natura by concealing the labours of ars (‘Einfallskunde’, 112-20). Final touches give an impression of polish comparable to the ‘glantz’ which Opitz wanted to bestow on vernacular poetry (GW II/1, 409). In spite of many differences, Rühmkorf’s concept of natura in the ‘Einfall’ and his personal codification of ars are recognizable re-workings of issues put forward by Opitz in the Buc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Note and Abbreviations
• 1 The Relationship between Theory and Poetry
• 2 Martin Opitz: Rhetoric and Consolation
• 3 Gottfried August Bürger: Rhetoric and ‘Volkspoesie’
• 4 Joseph von Eichendorff: Rhetoric and Hieroglyph
• 5 General Conclusion
• Appendix A: The Argument and Structure of the TrostGedichte
• Appendix B: The Source of ‘Das Lied vom Braven Manne’
• Bibliography