Things of Art and Amor: Mediation in Goethe’s Römische Elegien

Summary

Abstract: Poetry versus love, aesthetic form versus sensual experience, ancient past versus present: Goethe's Römische Elegien works through a series of opposites that dominate scholarly discussion to this day. This essay interprets the things of art and Amor as the common ground of a comprehensive mediation that underlies the oppositions noted in scholarship and places lyric form above all else. I n a journey through selected elegies of the cycle, the paper thereby focuses on the function of Amor who regulates mediation in various roles. A mor as a clever guide (elegy II*), as a matchmaker (II), as a servant (V), as a rogue and committed teacher (XIII), and as an authority (XIX) who advances to become the leading figure in Goethe's cycle. I n its continuous dynamics of playful mediation, it has one clear goal: poetic form.

Keywords: Amor, elegy, love poetry, mediation, poetic form, senses, aesthetic experience

TO THIS DAY, Goethe's Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies) seems to provoke a number of clichés: The elegies are interpreted as a testimony of Goethe's love for Christiane Vulpius. The text also has the reputation of being too heterogeneous and too frivolous for publication in Schiller's literary journal Die Horen (The Horae). N ot least, the text is seen as documenting a biographic midlife crisis that Goethe manages through erotic involvements— made possible only by turning away from provincial Weimar toward the Weltstadt (metropolis) Rome (Roma), which is famously recognized as a palindrome for Amor. Moreover, Römische Elegien provokes a scholarly controversy between holistic interpretations, on the one hand, which read the poems as part of a cycle, and on the other, interpretations that stress the fragmentary character of the text.

In this article, we take a step away from the emphatic celebration of inspired authorship and evocations of wholeness. I nstead, we explore how Goethe's elegies arise from and depend on things. The elegies feature a range of things typically included in literary texts: antique artifacts, objects of seduction, symbolic things, and, last but not least, “things of love”—Liebesdinge— and their structure of signification. We advance a relatively broad understanding of things by referring to a theoretical paradox that Dorothee Kimmich ascribes to things in literature.