Goethe and Yeats

Phillinen Crowning Wilhelm With a Wreath

This post follows up on the previous one, concerning poetic reinvention, which few poets manage to do, Goethe being an exception and perhaps Yeats. The article I referred to in that post had a footnote to an article on the subject of the title of this post by the wonderful poetry critic and scholar Marjorie Perloff. Her article dates back to 1971, which shows that good scholarship does not go out of date.

Perloff begins by mentioning the writers that led Yeats to Goethe, even as Yeats read no German, namely, Walter Pater and Edward Dowden, the latter an Irish professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, while also president of the English Goethe Society from 1886 to 1908. Dowden translated the West-East Divan. An instructive comment regarding the subject of re-invention occurs in the introduction to the translation (edited by Dowden's wife on its posthumous publication in 1914): "The Divan is the product of Goethe's Indian Summer of art-life, the rejuvenescence that came when he was sixty-five." In this connection, Perloff mentions Yeats' Crazy Jane lyrics and "the rhapsodizing of the joys of sexual life in [Yeats' letters]" in 1930, when he was sixty-five.

When Perloff wrote her article, Yeats' library had not yet been catalogued (has it since then?), so that it was difficult to know which works of Goethe Yeats had read. Despite his deficiency in the German language, however, it appears that he "obviously" knew Werther, Faust, and "the major lyrics," and may well have known Egmont, Tasso, and Iphigenia. The most influential works, however, were Wilhelm Meister, the John Oxenford translation of the conversations with Eckermann, and the Oxenford translation of Goethe's autobiography, which appeared in 1848 (not 1948).

I am not a Yeats' scholar, so I will not go into the particulars of what Yeats absorbed from reading Goethe, especially on the nature of "the Doctrine of the Mask" or the concept of "self-unity." (For those interested, the article is available on JSTOR.) Apparently, Yeats took from Wilhelm Meister less the plot or the characters than its themes, which he seemed to have used as a "book of wisdom." In this connection and in light of what I learned about Yeats' enthusiasm for Eckermann's conversations,  I cannot help thinking of my recent posts on Eckermann pastiches as well as on the appropriation of Goethe's words for all manner of commerce, prophecy, and self-help.

So, in this connection, Perloff quotes William Butler Yeats paraphrasing Goethe in "Anima Hominis" (1917):

"I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in Wilhelm Meister, accident is destiny."

As I did in the earlier posts mentioned above, let us see what Google Translate makes of this:

"Ich denke, dass alle religiösen Männer geglaubt haben, dass es in den Ereignissen des Lebens eine Hand gibt, die nicht unsere ist, und dass, wie jemand in Wilhelm Meister sagt, Zufall Schicksal ist."

To my ears, this sounds too prosaic for Goethe, granted that his thinking ran along these lines.

Image credit: Look and Learn History Picture Archive