Goethe's Late Verse

Summary

In a typically self-ironic poem in the West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan, 1819) Goethe lists the losses old age brings to everyone before defiantly asserting that two things remain to him, making life worthwhile: “Mir bleibt genug! Es bleibt Idee und Liebe!” This binary pairing of intellect and feeling lies at the heart of Goethe's “symbolic” outlook on old age. As Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) authoritatively demonstrated, Goethe's theory of symbolism covers both those “symbolic forms” on which a poet draws — as raw material, from traditional poetic meters through genres to concepts (in its broadest sense, “ideas”) — and what he makes of them to create a new, aesthetic structure of renewed significance, of “symbolic pregnance,” as Cassirer calls it (in other words, “felt experience,” at its most intense in “love”). And, as Rudolf Arnheim has argued in respect of Goethe, as well as Titian, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Cézanne, and Rodin, such a synthetic blending of mind and emotion is the defining characteristic of the “late style” found “in the end products of artists' long careers.” The notion of “lateness” in the work of an artist now occupies an important position in the history of criticism, and given the length of his life, and the historical and cultural periods it covers, it is not surprising that the category has been applied to Goethe's works. Erich Trunz's assessment that Goethe's Alterswerk began in 1809 when he started to write his autobiography has gained widespread support.