6 - Occasions: Goethe's Lyric Poetry

Summary

Fulfillments

GOETHE IS AT CROSS-PURPOSES with the conception of Faust in yet another way and even more fundamentally. Faust will lose the wager with Mephistopheles if he ever admits to contentment with an individual moment. His certainty that this will never happen is a dismissive judgment on all possible experience. Yet Goethe the poet declares, and his lyrical poetry embodies, the flat opposite. Over a long lifetime he repeatedly captures experiences of fulfillment with an intensity matched by no other German poet—moments of love, of beauty, of insight and pleasure in the natural world, of sheer exuberance in his own felt existence, often closely traceable to their originating moment. In the late poem “Vermächtnis” (Legacy) there is a paradoxical suggestion of permanence, that “der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit” (the moment is eternity.)

Not that Goethe's captured moments are grandiose. They arise from everyday occasions too familiar to be exciting (though he did once in young years have to throw himself from a bolting horse) and too obvious to be poetic—until, that is, they are transformed through the poet’s fresh and vigorous vision. When Goethe in old age comes to survey what he has all along been doing, “occasion” (Gelegenheit) becomes the central concept of an uncomplicated poetics.

Historic change pivots on the term. Where once it meant moments of public significance—births, marriages, victories, deaths—for which the worldly great, and later also citizens of substance, commissioned poems (Casualcarmina), it could now mean anybody's moments, experiences from the common life made memorable by feeling or insight—hence the other standard term “Erlebnisdichtung” (poetry of experience). It was a democratic appropriation.

That did not mean its range was narrowly private. On the contrary, it opened up the wider world to a lyrical realism:

The world is so large and rich, and life so multifarious, that there will never be a shortage of occasions for poems. But they must all be occasional poems; that is to say, reality must provide the motive and the material. A special case becomes general precisely because the poet treats it. All my poems are occasional poems, they are stimulated by reality and have their ground and roots in it.