10 - Hesse’s Poetry

Summary

The precision and sustained musicality of Hesse’s prose abundantly indicate that the author is a poet whose work cannot be contained in one literary genre. Surprisingly, his robust body of lyrical texts, whose impact on a worldwide readership equals that of his prose works, has widely been ignored by literary scholars. From the 1890s until the day of his death in 1962, Hesse, who downplayed the importance of his novels and defined himself primarily as a poet, wrote around 1,400 poems. Beginning in 1896, his lyrical works circulated in journals, and throughout his writing life, Hesse frequently included poems in his voluminous correspondence, often accompanied by his own drawings and watercolors. Hesse’s epistolary corpus constitutes an integral part of his literary work, and future studies have yet to approach the multigeneric, hybrid structure of his letters and their incorporation of poems in the nexus of his dialogic social praxis spanning over seven decades.

Hesse’s first book of poetry, Romantische Lieder (Romantic Songs), was published in 1898, followed by Gedichte (Poems, 1902), Unterwegs (On the Way, 1911), and Musik des Einsamen (Music of the Lonely, 1914). Between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the German Nazi regime, Hesse published the poetry volumes Gedichte des Malers (Poems of the Painter, 1920), Italien (Italy, 1923), Ausgewählte Gedichte (Selected Poems, 1921), Krisis (Crisis, 1928), Trost der Nacht (Comfort of the Night, 1929), and Jahreszeiten (Seasons, 1931). Five more books of poems followed: Vom Baum des Lebens (From the Tree of Life, 1934), Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1937), Zehn Gedichte (Ten Poems, 1940), Der Blütenzweig (The Blossoming Twig, 1945), and Stufen (Steps/Stages/Phases, 1961). Since 1942, numerous partial and comprehensive editions of Hesse’s lyrical works have appeared and continue to be produced. More than one million copies of Hesse’s poetry books have been sold in Germany alone, and several thousand musical compositions are based on Hesse’s poems.

Scholars, however, with very few exceptions, such as helpful recent contributions by Görner and Huber, still have not even begun to approach Hesse’s lyrical output with the thoroughness and perceptive openness that these multilayered yet accessible texts invite. Apart from reiterated divisions of Hesse’s lyrical output into distinct phases based upon a narrow understanding of the author’s biography, and redundant recyclings of evocative but unnuanced labels such as “confessional poetry in the spirit of Goethe,” patient reflections on Hesse’s lyrical works remain an exception.