OTHMAR SCHOECK'S SETTINGS OF GOTTFRIED KELLER

Extract

The Swiss author Gottfried Keller was 27 when he published his first volume of poems in 1846. His early poetry was partly influenced by the German battle for liberalism and the experience of those émigrés who, like Wagner, found their way to Switzerland. The main literary impulses came from Goethe and the German Romantics, impulses finding expression in subjective, even mystical verses. At the same time Keller never lost touch with the here-and-now: a feature that would earn him the description of a poetic realist.