Goethe's poetic reinvention

I came across an interesting comment about Goethe in an essay by the literary critic Graham Hough on the subject of "The Modernist Lyric." In the section in which Goethe is mentioned, Hough writes that long-form poetry became out of fashion in the 19th century: "The epic poem expresses a settled ethical choice; the lyric can be the expression of a transitory mood or a momentary illumination." This illumination or mood need not be consistent from lyric to lyric by the same poet, so "poetry becomes habituated to startling changes of mood and style."

The result, in the course of a poetic career, is that poets may find themselves "blocked" psychically. I mean, how much material can you dredge out of your subconscious or unconscious? Hough asserts that there are only three ways out of this psychic impasse:"alienation in the clinical sense"; reintegration on a lower level of insight and experience; and the successful individuation of disparate elements, leading to a more comprehensive experience on a higher level of insight." Literary history is littered with a number of "truncated literary careers," indicating that the last way out is the least common. And now the money quote:

"There are no Goethes in modern literature, and few poets whose lives show a long-sustained development, a perpetual re-creation of the self continued into late maturity of old age."

The one outstanding exception is Yeats. The reason, according to Hough, offers a similarity to Goethe's poetic trajectory, In the case of Yeats, Hough attributes his success in part to "a gift of fortune -- the fortune that cast his lot in with that of a small country, comprehensible by individual intelligence and will, rather than with the vast inhospitable movements of the wider world."

Without doubt, the move to Weimar led to a break in the poetic production that characterized Goethe's Sturm und Drang work, after which it took years for the "new Goethe" to appear. The break has intrigued me since I wrote my dissertation, which was precisely on the subject of the pre-Weimar Goethe. Goethe was scarcely cut off from the wider world in Weimar, but it was a "small" and "comprehensible" place in which he had the freedom to nourish his genius and constantly to transform himself.