The Poet's Self and the Poem: Essays on Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke and Thomas Mann

by Erich Heller

In this published version of the Lord Northcliffe Lectures in Literature, delivered at University College London in Spring 1975, Professor Heller is concerned with the imaginative mediation between life and art which is a major theme in the work of the four writers he discusses. The profound process by which a great work of literary art ('poem' in the title is used in a sense close to the German 'Dichtung') may grow out of a situation in life, mirror, and yet transcend it is illustrated by Goethe in Marienbad, Nietzsche in the 'Waste Land', Rilke in Paris and Thomas Mann in Venice.

Genres: Essays, Literary Criticism, Poetry

99 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read primarily for his views on Mann. Here's a nice quote: Shunning the ever more difficult alliance with the 'real', art has been tempted to settle where it is at last left to itself: in the sphere of abstraction and pure form. Thomas Mann showed the daring, misery and fatality of this emigration in Doctor Faustus. His own work as a literary artist was determined by his profound awareness of this historical temptation and at the same time by his moral resolve not to give in to it; for such a resignation would implicitly dismiss life as something utterly unresponsive to the desire for meaning, order or spiritual perfection, and thus declare it unworthy of the attentions of art.