Goethe and Romanticism

Goethe is often considered a "Romantic" writer. He pointedly distanced himself from the literary movement that is usually referred to as German Romanticism and that includes such diverse writers as the brothers Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Clemens Brentano, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Wackenroder. Goethe was a bit closer intellectually (and perhaps by sensibility) to the philosopher Schelling, but he literally seemed afraid of "contagion" by the younger generation, many of whom had come of age just as the French Revolution occurred. What made things worse for Goethe is that the younger writers took him as their model. Goethe's early writings, after all, had produced a new epoch in German literature, but by the time the German Romantic writers appears on the scene, by the late 1790s, Goethe had turned away from his own youthful literary enthusiasms. As Nicholas Boyle writes (in the first volume of his Goethe biography), by the 1780s Goethe "became more closely identified with the court culture," while gradually "his attention was turning to the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean."

These thoughts on Romanticism are prompted by my viewing yesterday of the film Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion. My friend Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, invited me to a showing sponsored by the Pforzheimer and the Keats-Shelley Association of America. The preview was in conjunction with the release of the movie, after its showing at various film festivals, this week in the U.S.

The movie, which concerns the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, gives more attention to Fanny than is usually the case with accounts of Keats's life. That is to say, Fanny hasn't traditionally come off too well in biographies of Keats. Jonathan Bate, for instance, has referred to the relationship as pitiful. Campion's film is in some sense revisionist, drawing on the more sympathetic reading of Fanny in Andrew Motion's recent biography of Keats.

There are plenty of sources concerning the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, including this one, which I leave for readers to investigate. What interested me was the portrayal of what might be called Romantic sensibility. As I have often stressed, it is really impossible wholly to enter into the mentality or even the material conditions of the past. Yet we never cease making the attempt. In the case of Bright Star, I kept thinking of the Jena Romantic circle, both the intensity of the poetic vocation and the volatile romantic relationships.

Something of the influence of Romantic-period painting can be seen in the photo below of actress Abbie Cornish, who plays the role of Fanny Brawne in Bright Star. For Romantic-period paintings of similar "Rooms with a View," see my posting of February 1, 2009.