Ludwig Tieck‘s Collection “Gedichte”: From a Fragment to an Encyclopedia
The first poetic collection of Ludwig Tieck, Gedichte (Poems) came out in 1821, a few years after the publication of the six-volume Fantasus, a collection of all the most significant works of the author. Gedichte thus saw light during the period of Tieck’s creative crisis, when no new collection was...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences
2018-09-01
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| Series: | Studia Litterarum |
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| Online Access: | http://studlit.ru/images/2018-3-3/Zotova.pdf |
| Summary: | The first poetic collection of Ludwig Tieck, Gedichte (Poems) came out in 1821, a few years after the publication of the six-volume Fantasus, a collection of all the most significant works of the author. Gedichte thus saw light during the period of Tieck’s creative crisis, when no new collection was needed. The first part of the Poems consists of both the fragments of already published texts and of some new works. The peculiarity of this collection lies in the peculiar approach to the processing of Tieck’s own texts: all the fragments are published without indicating the origin. Being fragmented, the original text is changed and revised, and this makes it difficult to determine its origin. Fragments always get their own name that is short and summative. The titles of the poems feature the main romantic topoi, and the editing of the texts is fulfilled in accordance with the title of the topic. The author organizes the collection thematically, moving from one group of closely related topics to another, cutting out fragments from their original context and giving them a new one. Tieck’s peculiar collection may be interpreted as a kind of “encyclopedia” of early Romanticism. Unlike the universalism of the Fantasus collection where the texts of Tieck, relating to different genres, are framed by a narrative framework that reveals the author’s main aesthetic views, the encyclopedic nature of the Poems implies a new, maximally detached view of one’s own creativity. The collection is fundamentally different from all the other collections by Tieck and, apparently, represents an attempt of the author to rethink his own role in the development of the Romantic movement and also marks the beginning of his disengagement with the movement. |
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| ISSN: | 2500-4247 2541-8564 |