13 - Herder's Poetic Works, His Translations, and His Views on Poetry

Summary

IN HISTORIES OF GERMAN LYRIC POETRY, Herder has no place. Also, his narrative and dramatic works are rarely mentioned in histories of German literature. It is true that he contributed in an extraordinary way to the evolution of a “new” poetry in the 1770s, but through theoretical stimulation rather than in his own creative practice. Herder started early to write poems, and cultivated the genre his entire life. The fact that he did not publish volumes of his own poetry seems to indicate his own doubts about its quality. Only toward the end of his life did he plan to collect his lyric output and to edit and publish it, a plan that he was never to realize.

During the early nineteenth century, Herder's readers were unable to get an idea of his lyrical oeuvre. In the comprehensive edition of his works published after his death, no poetry was included until the 15th and 16th volumes, which appeared in 1817. The selection was by no means comprehensive. After that, selections or single poems continued to appear from time to time in anthologies. To name an example: the anthology Deutsche Dichter by Ernst Götzinger, published in several editions, included some of Herder's poems. Götzinger selected twenty-six texts from throughout Herder's oeuvre, with commentary. Here, negative judgments are already prevalent: according to Götzinger, Herder had little “schaffende Phantasie” (creative imagination, 434); many of his poems looked like “dilettantische Versuche” (attempts of a dilettante, 436). Although Hempel's 1867 National-Bibliothek sämmtlicher deutscher Klassiker included in its selections from Herder's early works a large number of poems, edited by Heinrich Düntzer, by the turn of the century the verdict on Herder as a lyrical poet seemed to be definitively set: the twentieth-century editor and critic Emil Ermatinger also used the term “dilettante”: “Herder gehört zu jenen großen Dilettanten, die der menschliche Geist von Zeit zu Zeit bedarf, um jenen starken Schritt vorwärts zu tun, den der trippelnde Gang oder das Am-Ort-Gehen der zünftigen Wissenschaft oft nicht zu tun vermag” (20; Herder belongs to those great dilettantes whom the human mind from time to time needs to make that strong step forward, that the faltering step or the running-in-place of professional science is often not able to do).