an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Fall/Winter 2019/2020, ISSN
1552-5112
Hegel on Lyric Poetry: Between Classical and Romantic
Lyric poetry is a genre that has long
resisted theorization, and among theories of lyric, Hegel’s has received
relatively little sustained attention. In the context of his overall system,
however, and of the Romantic era in which he lived, Hegel’s theory of lyric
remains highly suggestive. No doubt Hegel was a philosophical idealist, and his
idealism of a self-evolving, self-related Absolute finds a corollary in his
understanding of lyric as one expression of free minds and peoples. More
ambiguous is Hegel’s stance relative to the categories of ‘classical’ and
‘romantic’ so favoured in his time. In this article,
drawing mainly on Hegel’s mature
aesthetics,[1] I will outline Hegel’s understanding of lyric, and argue
that he approaches it from a predominantly Romantic perspective: lyric is the
poetry of subjectivity, at once individual and communal. At the same time,
however, Hegel looks more firmly back to Classical Greece for lyric techniques
and models, even as he conceptualizes Greek exemplars like Pindar and Anacreon
in an essentially Romantic way. As a result, a fundamental ambivalence pervades
his assessment of lyric poetry: the genre expresses the
self-consciousness individual spirit and thus may seem poised to become the
dominant art-form for a self-conscious modern and ‘Romantic’ world; and yet the
unrepeatable Greek achievement may well mean that lyric in its highest vocation is a thing of the past.
The
Berlin Lectures of Fine Art are a
rich source of aesthetic thought partly for the manner in which they freely
reflect on and compare each of its chosen art-forms (architecture, sculpture,
painting, music, poetry) and styles (symbolic, classical, romantic), attempting
to understand each in itself and in relation to the entirety of thought and
even of human history. In this effort at a totalizing system, lyric poetry is
brought into special relation with music, as one of the least material and most interior of art forms. Yet though Hegel’s
lectures suggest a multiplicity of connections, one should not be distracted
from the most obvious aspect of his classification. Namely, lyric poetry is poetry--the art-form that Hegel privileges, like Friedrich
Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling and other ‘Romantic’ thinkers, as essentially the
universal art: the form of sensuous expression that can capture experience most
comprehensively, the ‘poetic’ for Hegel is both that which differentiates all
art-forms from mere ‘prose’ and which is the ultimate telos of artistic development.[2] In turn, poetry has three fundamental
sub-species: epic poetry is objective and universalizing, lyric poetry is
subjective and particular, while drama synthesizes epic action and lyric
passion in a significant clash of character. In this analysis, Hegel gives his
own gloss to terms that were, and still are, standard. For Goethe in 1819 had
named epic, lyric, and drama as the three ‘natural’ forms of poetry, and in
time this Goethean classification is said to have become the ‘undisputed basis for most generic
classifications of literature’ with ‘an almost world-wide relevance.’[3] But Hegel characteristically goes one
step further by associating Goethe’s Urformen with
quasi-logical moments in the ‘concept’ of poetry, itself a moment of his larger
concept of the beautiful. Indeed, each of the poetic sub-species are structured
by the dialectic of the Hegelian
Concept: in any poem, some guiding universal
(e.g. epic war, lyric emotion, dramatic conflict) differentiates itself into a
range of particular details (e.g.
images, personae, metaphors), each of which is so skillfully handled that they
resonate with all others as individual
reflections of the universal permeating them.[4]
Comparing and contrasting Hegel’s
treatment of epic and lyric poetry may help to illustrate his quasi-logical
structuring of poetic forms and history--and to highlight the essentially
Romantic tenor of his approach to lyric specifically. In Hegel’s triad of
poetic forms, lyric follows epic as its
dialectical opposite and twin. Epics are long, lyrics short. Epics tend
to celebrate a glorious past of a whole people, lyrics the intense, present
experiences of an individual.[5] Epics
narrate the objective deeds of gods and heroes with a single metre--the broad, impressive hexameter; lyric adopts an
endless array of metres and forms to match the
‘incalculable variety’ of
subjective moods, feelings and ideas.[6] Epic juxtaposes discrete phenomenon in
the panorama of a verbal space; lyric evokes feelings as they emerge in time.[7] In sum, where epic is the universal poetry that depicts a whole
world through one characteristic action, in a single style and hexameter meter,
lyric is the poetry of particularity
that sings the self with its infinite profusion of feelings and ideas.[8] This quasi-logical structuring of poetic
forms seems designed also to account for the chronological precedence of epic
in many national histories: epics tend to occur early as a people emerge from pastoral nomadism, but lyric voices
appear as later, self-conscious
reactions against the settled, ‘prosaic’ conditions of work, fixed customs,
laws, and institutions.[9] Many of these
reflections remain quite suggestive and widely shared: notably, Hegel’s
association of lyric with his logical moment of particularity—and with hence the
realm of shifting contingencies that seem to evade the full intelligibility of
concepts—fully anticipates contemporary theorists’ standard
remark (and lament) that lyric
resists full theorization, though they rarely realize the Hegelian precedent.[10]
Hegel himself is too optimistic about
the powers of reason to let the matter rest there. For while in their
multifarious content and forms lyrics may seem
to resist full categorization, Hegel would claim to detect the dynamic of his
Idea at work. In broad outline, the Hegelian Idea is that process or reality
that overreaches itself to overcome the otherness of nature and human history,
and gradually subsume them into ever higher spiritual forms: in even more
Hegelian terms, the Concept is unified with Nature in Spirit or the Idea, and
‘the Idea is the unity of the Concept and existence.’[11] This absolute idealism has its
corollaries in Hegel’s remarks on the dynamic of artistic composition and
works. Epics, for example, can be analyzed as moving from some universal situation
(e.g. a war of national importance) to particular representative moments (e.g.
duels), while lyrics, develop a particular momentary mood with language and
images that are universally resonant; and
so where the epic poet submerges his personality in the matter-of-fact
narrative of an objective past, the
lyric poet lets his mood ‘overflow’ into charged language most appropriate to
his passionate present. Once again, for Hegel, lyric song arises when a ‘mood
of the heart [is] concentrated on a concrete situation’[12] and thereby made objectively
intelligible to others; again, lyric develops a particular
momentary mood with language and images that are universally suggestive; the lyric poet lets his mood ‘overflow’
into the charged language of words, images, metaphors, rhythm, or rhyme—all of
these become means of giving subjectivity a sensuous, objective expression.[13] The dialectical dynamic that Hegel
detects in the background here is summarized in the remark that the content of
all poetry is ‘reason individualized.’[14] In more concrete terms, poetry can
treat all experience, external and internal. The objective tone of epic orients
it to the seemingly external, but while the lyric poet can also sing of anything, what distinguishes it as lyric
is the poet’s arresting selection, ordering, and revelatory treatment.[15] Thus lyric content gains its poetic
importance only in relation to the genius of the poet--and for his brilliant
insights, there can be ‘no fixed apriori criterion.’[16] The lyric poet, then, becomes for Hegel
a ‘subjective totality’ and even a ‘subjective work of art,’ who contains
multitudes within himself and is able to express that inner universality to
others.[17] It is in this way that great lyric
poetry is not merely subjective, but has a universality of appeal. The lyric
poet does not simply speak his own
feelings and experiences; more precisely, he sings of some dominant feeling
with a concision that yet draws intensely on all the resources of his culture.
In doing so, he can capture and evoke the mind of an entire people or nation.
Thus, just as epics are often the ‘bibles’ of a people, so ‘the entirety of a
nation’s lyric poetry may ... run through the entirety of the nation’s
interests, ideas and aims,’ including fundamental religious and philosophical
ideas.[18] Moreover, the lyric poet binds his subjective feelings and ideas
so perfectly with objective expressions and lyric forms that the two become
inseparably one in the poem: in the lyric poem, mind and the objective world
are unified into a single, seamless whole. Thus the
lyric poem becomes (in Hegelian language) truly Ideal, beautiful, and an
expression of the Absolute Spirit, which is the full union of subjectivity and
objectivity, of the Concept and Nature. It is as if in the Hegelian systematic,
the lyric poet becomes the vessel through which the divine cosmos comes to
voice itself.
Not only does this approach reflect
Hegel’s absolute idealism: it also echoes many themes associated with ‘Romanticism.’
Hegel was of course explicitly critical of a certain aesthetic irrationalism in
Schelling, the gothic obscurities of Hoffman and von Kleist, the ‘nullity and
indecision… and trash’ of Goethe’s Werther or Jacobi’s Woldemar,
the ironies of Friedrich Schlegel, and the general Romantic decadence that has produced an ‘awful
confusion of our taste which takes pleasure in anything and everything.’[19] Romanticism itself is, of course, a plurivocal term, whose centre has
been variously located: imagination, emotionalism, organic unity, the wayward
genius, the genius of the people, the natural and ordinary, the supernatural
and exotic, knightly romances and medieval Christendom, the post-Classical and
the modern. Hegel uses the label ‘Romantic’ for art in which the consciousness
of the Idea has become too great for sensual expression and yearns for some
deeper religious or philosophical embodiment. So in
Hegel’s sense, the ‘Romantic’ is associated with the Christian and
post-classical, hence with the ‘Germanic’ world and ultimately the modern,
scientific present. Yet, despite all this, with regard to lyric poetry, his
conception of it as concise
self-expression that is at once intensely personal and implicitly universal,
voicing an individual’s inner experience (ranging from vague feelings to
precise Schillerian ideas) and yet capturing the spirit of his times, people,
and even mankind itself, rooted in the twin inspirations of experience and
Spirit or God--herein may be detected many elements of an essentially Romantic
approach to lyric: self-expression, genius and organic totality. Perhaps most
tellingly, Hegel associates lyric primarily with music (for him the Romantic
art par excellence), an idea shared by Schiller, Novalis, Nietzsche, and others, who speak of how
an indeterminate ‘musical mood’ or rhythmical line comes first—and only after,
the determinate words, which give the underlying feeling objective embodiment,
as it were.[20] In sum, one imagines that Hegel would
not have disagreed with Wordsworth’s famous definition of ‘good
poetry [as] the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.’[21]
Like
Wordsworth and others, Hegel associates the Romantic most with the modern present. And when he would dialectically trace
his universal ‘concept’ of lyric through the particulars that
instantiate and actualize it in historical reality, we see him applying an
essential ‘Romantic’ approach to past exemplars. It is this essential
Romanticism, I suggest, that is more determinative of his understanding of
individual poems than are the parallel sets of categories that he himself
adduces or draws on: by genre, into hymns, odes, and songs (Lieder); by style, into Symbolic,
Classical, and Romantic; and by historical period, into Oriental, Greek, Roman,
and Germanic. Thus, in the case of hymns, it is not simply that a poet praises
a deity. Rather, the hymn (in Hegel’s analysis) arises from the poet’s inner
absorption in the god, so that what the poet really expresses is his own awe
and wonder before the sublime Other--truly other in the Psalms, more
individualized in the case of the anthropomorphic deities of the Homeric Hymns.[22] The difference
between poet and subject-matter that defines Symbolic hymns is elided in the
central genre of the Classical style--the ode. In odes, it is again some mighty
external other that is the initial impetus for song, but with much struggle the
poet ‘masters his subject, transforms it within himself, brings himself to
expression in it.’ The struggle leaves its mark in the ‘swing and boldness of
language,’ the leaps of thought, that characterize great odes. [23] Such descriptions
of the genre seem most inspired primarily by Pindar, known for his difficult
expression, and who for Hegel occupies the ‘summit of perfection’ in this type of lyric.[24]
The following passage touches upon many
of Hegel’s ideas concerning the Pindaric ode, as it evolved from
commission to performance:
…Pindar was frequently asked to
celebrate this or that victor in the Games and indeed he made his living by
taking money for his compositions; and yet, as bard, he puts himself in his hero’s place and independently combines with
his own imagination the praise of the deeds of his hero’s ancestors, it may be;
he recalls old myths, or he expresses his own profound view of life, wealth,
dominion, whatever is great and honourable, the
sublimity and charm of the Muses, but above all the dignity of the bard.
Consequently in his poems he is not so much concerned
to honour the hero whose fame he spreads in this way as
to make himself, the poet, heard. He himself has not the honour of having sung the praises of victors, for it is
they who have acquired honour by being made the
subject of Pindar’s verse (LA
2.1129-30, italics added).
Hegel implicitly
associates Pindar’s odes in praise of athletic victors with eighteenth-century Gelegenheitsgedichte, ‘occasional poems’ composed for a
prince or patron to celebrate a birth, wedding or official event. But whereas
these were relatively bureaucratic affairs of princelings, the Greek Games were
public occasions of ‘the highest importance and substantive worth, the glorification of the gods as well as of victors in those games wherein
the Greeks… had an objective vision of their national unity.’[25] These grand Panhellenic occasions
Pindar manages to raise to an even higher significance by relating them to the
religious and poetic tradition, thus associating the victors to the gods and
heroes, and charging the listening community with something of the poet’s own
sublime consciousness. On the one hand, Hegel tries to justify Pindar’s odes as
‘classical’ in his sense of the term: they balance seeming opposites—particular
occasion and universal significance, human community and divine background,
traditional myths and free poetic imagination, or abstractly, the Concept and
its particular instantiations. On the other hand, what takes on ultimate
importance is not so much the occasion, athletic victory and subject-matter, as
the poet himself, the mind whose universal
vision transforms bare particulars
into concrete individual
events shot through with absolute meaning. Pindar himself asserts the ‘dignity
of the bard’ as equal to that of kings, yet for Hegel, it is even higher than
that, for Pindar first asserts the sacred status of the poet as bard, vates and free creator against the prosaic world of
princes, patrons and publishers--a
feat accomplished also by Hegel’s Klopstock and Schiller. In all this, what is
most determinative for Hegel is how a lyricist like Pindar
ultimately sings
himself -- as the true embodiment of
all that Greece was. As the ‘overflowing’ of a poetic soul seeped in the
history, mythology, and mentality of his people, the odes of Pindar allow Greek
to think itself: through the odes, Greece attains its highest
self-consciousness, that Hegel would associate further with the divine Mind,
the self-thinking Idea.[26]
Such an idealistic / Romantic
understanding of the ode make it (for Hegel) the
logical predecessor for the next main lyric form, the song (Lied), which makes more explicit still
the universal dynamic of the genre. Hafiz, Anacreon, and Goethe are taken as
champions of the Lied for the
Symbolic Orient, Classical Greece, and Romantic Germany, respectively. Let us
dwell briefly on the latter two. First, the Anacreonta with their themes of
the rose, vine, women, wine, and the passing of time, had long been favourites for translation and imitation: in
eighteenth-century Germany by von
Hagedorn, Gleim, Uz, Götz, Hölty and Johann Jacobi; Thomas Moore was known as ‘the Irish Anacreon,’ and Hafiz
‘the Persian Anacreon.’ Goethe too wrote his Anacreontics
in his Leipziger Liederbuch
of 1770, and his 1806 Anakreons
Grab is much anthologized. It is the
same Rococo figure that appears in Hegel’s Anacreon, as he sings about himself in all circumstances and times, ‘among roses, lovely girls and youths, as
drinking and dancing, in cheerful enjoyment, without desire or longing, without
duty, and without neglecting higher ends’—a ‘hero’ and a ‘subjective work of
art.’[27] Thus, like Pindar, Hegel’s Anacreon
ultimately sings himself. With a little extrapolation, the verdict would seem valid
for Hegel’s Goethe too: while Hegel acknowledges Goethe’s accomplishments in
many lyric genres, he ultimately categorizes him as the poet of the Lied in
German. Taking all experience as an occasion for song, Goethe’s Lieder express his own self in its
complexity, and give voice to the ‘German’ heart as nothing else has done.[28] Hegel does not quite call Goethe the
German Anacreon, but his juxtaposition of the two within the ‘Romantic’ genre
of the Lied may point in that
direction: a rather deflating view, if so, that would make Goethe’s lyric songs
purely private expressions, somewhat
tangential to the great events of the early 1800s.
This
brings us to Hegel’s somewhat ambivalent verdict on the temporal placing and
durability of the lyric genre itself. The infamous statement of the Lectures has it that art ‘in its highest
vocation is a thing of the past’ [H]: modern society is too mediated by general
ideas for modern peoples to be able to be enthralled to the spontaneous sensual
delight of true aesthetic experience. That the best days of the arts of epic or
sculpture belong to the past may have seemed less controversial, but what of
lyric? Goethe was still alive in the 1820s, and from one Hegelian perspective it would seem that lyric has a promising future. Hegel
affirms that all peoples sing and have their songs, the lyric impulse ‘is
renewed at every season’ and ‘every age strikes its new note of song and the
earlier one dies away until it is mute altogether.’[29] The earliest peoples sing their naïve
folk-songs and ballads, and it would seem that impulse to sing is universal and
timeless--and hence not in danger of fading away.[30] For in Hegel’s perspective, lyric
proper, as the expression of individual subjectivity, arises only later in
national histories, as a reaction against, and antidote to, the emergence of
the gray prose of life. Then the lyric poet sings of himself, and discovers in
his own experience of small particularities moments of universal significance:
such proper lyric Hegel traces through Archaic Greece, late Republic Rome, the Minnesingers of the late Middle Ages,
and the Romantic period. His implicit association of lyric with particular subjectivity
would seem to make the modern world the best time for lyric poetry: the spirit
of medieval and modern Christian peoples is explicitly likened to that of the
lyric self, in that it too is based on ‘the basis of the personality which is
forced to produce out of its own resources as its own what is substantive and
objective.’[31] Indeed, for Hegel the modern mind is
reproducing out of its own infinitude the shapes of all realities, and this
project of absolute idealism seems the proper context for his remark that lyric
is ‘especially opportune in modern times’:[32] both the modern and lyric selves
reproduce the world from their ‘idea.’ Such an approach, I suggest, bears a
family resemblance to the more famous statements by Novalis and Friedrich
Schlegel that the world must be romanticized and made ‘poetic.’[33]
On the other hand, if the notion of the
‘lyrical’ modern self is more metaphorical than literal, one wonders whether
Hegel was as optimistic as a Novalis concerning the ongoing importance of
lyric. In Hegel’s historical survey, it is clear that Pindar’s odes sum up the
historical and religious experience of the Greeks in a sensuously powerful way:
uniting song, mythology, and dance, they were spectacles with a public and
religious centrality that is not quite afforded a Klopstock, Goethe, or
Schiller. Pindar could sum up the highest spirit of his times, but his unique
synthesis was soon overtaken by the art of drama, and by the yet more
subjective outlook of Sophistic and Socratic thinkers. Analogously, Goethe was
somehow able to translate his multifarious experience into song, but if modern
culture, civil society and states demand that individuals specialize, then
could it easily produce another Goethe, able to tackle everything from politics
and biology to painting and poetry? Whether Goethe is a unique,
unrepeatable phenomenon, or a modern type who would recur, Hegel does not say.
Yet his attempt at a definitive
system suggests that in the course of its history poetry has run through all
its logical possibilities: the self-thinking in Pindar’s odes and Anacreon’s
songs were overtaken by Attic drama and Socratic philosophy, but the even more
acute self-consciousness of Goethe’s lyrics seem to look beyond poetry
altogether, to the higher spiritual expressions of Protestant Christianity and
idealist philosophy.
Decisive
support for this conclusion might be found in Hegel’s long, and neglected,
discussion of versification. In some 25 pages, Hegel argues that modern
languages cannot reproduce the superlative rhythms of ancient Greek and are
therefore deficient poetically. To summarize the argument: Greek rhythm, determined by length of
syllables, metrical accent and caesura, produces a subtler variety of
word-music and diffuses meaning across the line, thereby fusing sense entirely
‘with the sensuous element of sound and temporal duration, so that this
external element can be given its full rights in serenity and joy, and ideal
form and movement can be made the sole concern’[34]—a veritable
‘classical’ synthesis of form and content. Medieval and modern rhyme, by contrast, concentrates meaning
on stressed root words, effecting a far greater focus on meaning independent of sounds, and thus
introducing an incipient split between ideas and their verbal medium. Hegel
will therefore claim that Greek verse is ‘most beautiful and richest’; it is
paradigmatic; rhyme, by contrast, ‘is a thumping sound that does not need so
finely cultivated an ear as Greek versification necessitates.’[35] Hegel mentions how Klopstock, the older
Voss, and Goethe attempted to revive ancient metres—but with dubious success,
for no abstract programme or act of will can entirely remake a language,
reintroduce syllable lengths by position and mitigate verbal accents.[36] The
difficulties are not merely technical, Hegel thinks: the cumulative changes of
centuries have made modern languages freer and ‘intellectualized.’[37] The project of setting modern content to ancient
technical forms (as in Goethe’s classicizing poems, Antiker Form sich nähernd)
seems in vain: ‘it is not possible to achieve the plasticity of metre in the
sterling way that classical antiquity did.’[38] If so, Hegel’s implicit judgment on Weimar Classicism
seems clear: not authentically ‘classical’ at all but rooted in the same spirit
of individual, Christian spirit as more obviously ‘Romantic’ productions. If
modern languages themselves cannot accommodate the spontaneous complexity of
Greek lyric, it would seem that for Hegel, the heyday
of lyric is past. ‘Classical’ poetry
is a thing of the past, contemporary ‘Romantic’ poetry is edging ever closer to
self-conscious and philosophical abstractions—and lyric itself is lost as the
highest medium that it enjoyed in the time of Pindar’s Panhellenic odes.
I
think this is likely to be Hegel’s final judgment on lyric as
a whole, even though his synthesis in LA only partially resolves its own tensions and unstated
assumptions. Perhaps less than fully appreciative of his debts to Romantic
theorists, Hegel uses his own idealist/Romantic ‘concept’ of lyric to
understand all lyrics, even while more consciously echoing philhellenic
reverence for the Greek classics, Pindar above all. A similar matrix of
elements would inspire others, from Hölderlin to
Heidegger, in their struggle to overcome verdicts like Hegel’s.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Fall/Winter
2019/2020, ISSN 1552-5112
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Notes