You never know what’s going to pop up in the book reviews, reminding you of wonderful things. This time it is this dapper fellow; though I almost prefer the picture that was actually in the review, below, when he was older and more – ahem – you know, jaded.
Here he is, in a review by Richard Eder of his newly re-published Travel Pictures, skewering a lesser poet:
“’Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the least means’, he declares, and… he writes that von Platen was no true poet because ‘language never became his internal master, but he became a master of language, or rather he imposed his mastery like a virtuoso on an instrument’.”
This is of course a lesson in itself, though I disagree about nature. Of course, it is possible to argue that, say, a couple of rose bushes and a few cows are small means – thinking of my recent weekend in West Sussex – but nature also went totally overboard there on the thistles, nettles and dead bunnies in the road; and I’d like to say those had no very great effect.
Back to Heine, if you wanted some context:
“Heinrich Heine has been called “the first modern intellectual” – and with good reason. During the 1830s and 1840s, when living in Parisian exile, Heine made an art of commenting on the modern urban experience. From what might be called a progressive perspective, and in the feuilletonistic style* of which he was a pioneer, he examined the “social significance” of all manner of phenomena, from major political occurrences, as the July Revolution of 1830, to the arrangement of fancy new commodities in shop windows.”
Heine, in exile in Paris, was a cultural and political progressive. His books were banned in 1835 – the German government tried to have them banned worldwide! He was an admirer of Napoleon. His poem in support of the striking Silesian weavers in 1844, defying the German ban on all his works, was translated into English by Engels and became a rallying cry.
“Doomed be the fatherland, false name,
Where nothing thrives but disgrace and shame,
Where flowers are crushed before they unfold,
Where the worm is quickened by rot and mould -
We weave, we weave.”
And he corresponded (”I agree we are all brothers, but I am the big brother and you are the little brothers”) with Karl Marx, who was also an admirer of his work. Here he is, in prophetic mode:
“Do not smile at my advice — the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature…Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world’s history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”
His poetry is deceptively simple – like the effects of nature, above – with dripping leaves and weeping hearts, and also some pretty caustic observations of his current scene, as well as of the Greek gods. As Eder says, he makes Byron look like your Sunday school teacher. One of his poems has this thing about a dream, where his dream itself speaks to him, “in German” – it says, “I love you.” Wonderful.
He died relatively young, in his fifties, of some lingering illness. His last words were,”God will forgive me. It’s his job.”
* I want a feuilletonistic style too! I want it, I want it! Oh, wait.
