SOURCE: Galinsky, Hans. “Northern and Southern Aspects of Nineteenth Century American-German Interrelations: Dickinson and Lanier.” In American-German Literary Interrelations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Christoph Wecker, pp. 124-25, 139-50. Munich: Fink, 1983.

[In the following excerpt, Galinsky examines both Emily Dickinson's and Sidney Lanier's understanding of and influence by German literature. Galinsky considers Lanier's knowledge of Germany and German literature, and conversely, Germany's relative disinterest in Lanier's work.]

1

Why is it that on the one hand we know so surprisingly little about Emily Dickinson's knowledge of Germany and about the creative uses she put that knowledge to, whereas we know a good deal about her reception in Germany and her impact on German poets? Why is it that on the other hand we know a great deal about Sidney Lanier's knowledge of Germany and his creative uses of it, while we know next to nothing about his German reception and impact? Has this complementary asymmetry anything to do with the sectional division of North and South in the 19th century United States, and with German attitudes toward that division? Besides, is this complementary asymmetry, as regards Dickinson, not in striking contrast to what we generally have come to know about the influence of German literature, philosophy, and music in the United States, especially in New England, between 1830 and 1860, a period of culminating German impact?¹

By these four questions I am trying to whet researchers' appetites for further exploration. My subject, bringing in two authors, is large. Thus transparence and selectivity have to be aimed at. Selectivity, however, has its drawbacks. It makes most readers or audiences react like users of dictionaries: “For what is there none cares a jot. But all are wrath with what is not.” The arrangement of my material will be very simple, dichotomous almost throughout. There will be a Dickinson and a Lanier part. Each of these parts, implementing the interrelations angle of my paper, will fall into an American, and a German section. In each of the sections reception will come first, creative use of what has been received will follow. …

As for the Lanier part, areas of German life as responded to by Lanier will be presented in their total biographical range, yet the productive and reproductive uses will be shown mostly in Lanier's only novel, Tiger-Lilies, and in his efforts to translate Heine and Wagner. …

3

With Sidney Lanier the scene shifts from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Macon, and Oglethorpe College, Georgia, to Civil-War Virginia and Maryland, finally to Maryland's post-bellum Baltimore. Dickinson and Lanier never met in person but they did meet in the editorial and critical activities of friends.² At no time did they become aware of their connectedness by their relations with German culture.

3.1

Lanier's reception of things German is well-known. Like Dickinson's, it depends on American acquaintances and on the printed page, including the printed score of performed music, in his case self-performed rather than other-performed. Unlike Dickinson's, his contacts take in many German-Americans and some more recent immigrants and visitors.³

As to received areas of German life, and their chronological sequence, contacts with German language, literature, philosophy, and probably music as well are established at the same time as they are with German science, especially chemistry.⁴ Most of this peculiar constellation is effected by one intermediary, yet the scientific component as such is typical of American-German interrelations while the wave of Transcendentalism is receding. Beyond that constellation only German politics and philology, Germanic inclusive of Old English, put in an occasional appearance.⁵

Reception begins in an ideal academic atmosphere. In 1859-60 Lanier, an Oglethorpe senior, enrolled in the chemistry class of thirty-one year old professor James Woodrow, uncle of later President Woodrow Wilson, Harvard-trained but recently returned from Germany, a Heidelberg Ph. D. summa cum laude. As Lanier scholar Edd Parks has put it:

Professor and student took long walks together, discussing the ideas of Hegel and the poetry of Heine and Herder. About this time Lanier came under the spell of Carlyle, and through him the German romantic writers, especially Richter and Novalis. Woodrow encouraged Lanier to learn German and French.⁶

Newly acquired knowledge becomes productive first in the field of philosophy. Valedictorian Lanier, for topic of his address, chose a Hegel-sounding topic: “The Philosophy of History.”⁷ This youthful interest in German philosophy persists. In his very last work, The English Novel and the Principle of Its Development (1883), this principle of individuality is discussed with reference to neo-idealist Rudolf Eucken's Fundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophical Thought (1880) (Die Grundbegriffe der Philosophie der Gegenwart, 1878).⁸

Germany beckoned a second time, this time as a compromise, a sort of escape from a professional dilemma. Neither his father's, a lawyer's, wish for him to enter a legal career nor young Sidney's own desire to take up music and composition was to be followed, but like Professor Woodrow he would go to Heidelberg, earn a Ph. D. and thus “qualify” for an American academic post in the field of literature.⁹

The Civil War killed this plan yet kept intact, nay, even intensified Lanier's interest in the language and the literature of Germany.¹⁰ Carlyle maintained his position as chief intermediary. His two-volume translation German Romance, his many essays on German letters in the Boston 1859 edition of his Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, and his image of German culture as presented in the novel Sartor Resartus and The Life of Friedrich Schiller kept familiarizing Lanier with German literary works in translation.¹¹ They also supplied biographical information and critical comment. Martin Luther had already figured as a freedom hero in the young Confederate volunteer's speech at the hoisting of the Flag of the Confederation on the Oglethorpe campus.¹² The Confederate soldier and later Federal prisoner, under external pressures, fell back on his acquired intellectual and literary treasures. He tried to add to them Lessing, two Swabians, Schelling and Uhland, a Berliner, Tieck,¹³ and, if not already encountered before, Goethe, Novalis, and Heine. Carlyle's criticism took note not only of individual German Classical and Romantic authors but also of a whole period which he called “earlier German literature.” His essay of this title concerned German late 15th century works. Of their authors Thomas a Kempis stuck in Lanier's mind as he did in Emily Dickinson's.¹⁴

Lanier rarely rounded out his knowledge of Carlyle-recommended authors in the direction of some of their works not translated or commented on by his Scottish guide. In this rare way Jean Paul Richter's Levana, or, The Doctrine of Education widened Lanier's scope of receptivity.¹⁵

Carlyle's orbit was not left until the 1870s. Baltimore gradually became Lanier's home, and business trips to Philadelphia, New York and Boston established personal links with the North.¹⁶ The professional motor of all this, music, took over as leading interest; the problem of the relationship of the two arts, literature and music, became a fascination. Blended with it was the concept of the artist as national educator, unifying a divided, confused people by the power of moral sentiments released by the two arts.

Naturally, in this context Richard Wagner would arise as a new lodestar outside of the old literature-fixed constellation of German authors. Wagner's esthetic idea of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ but also his socio-economic and educational thought attracted Lanier. Except a German anthology, which he explicitly mentions in an 1864 letter with reference to selections from Heine and another as yet unidentified German poet,¹⁷ Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen is the only text part of which he read in the original German.¹⁸ In translation he probably perused a volume of Wagner's essays, some dealing with the social functions of art.¹⁹ Musicological literature of the biographical sort reached him through a translated Life of Robert Schumann.²⁰

Natural mediators between Lanier and German music were to be found among Lanier's colleagues in Baltimore's Peabody orchestra. Many of them, including the conductor, were of German descent, some of them were recent immigrants.²¹

As for literature's relation with music, to which Wagner had alerted him forcefully, the problem of the “tone-translation” of a poem began to interest Lanier. He found the problem exemplified by a German poem and a German composer, i. e. Uhland's ‘The Minstrel's Curse’ (“Des Sängers Fluch”) set to music by Hans von Bülow.²²

As for new purely literary mediators, there turned up only one: Pennsylvanian Bayard Taylor. Correspondence with him kept up from summer 1875 to Taylor's Berlin American Embassy post and death in 1878 revived Lanier's interest in Goethe,²³ whose Faust Taylor had translated in the original meter. Taylor may also have directed his friend's attention to regionalist and early social realist Berthold Auerbach. Except Wagner, this novelist is the only contemporary German author Lanier ever referred to.²⁴ Next to Longfellow Taylor was the most influential literary mediator between 19th century America and Germany. Like Longfellow very knowledgeable about the country and its culture as well, here was a person to convey to Lanier a personal image of Germany, the variety of its scenery, and the mentality of its people.²⁵

In the early 1870s the problematical relationship of music and literature had given a new focus to his reading interests. Now, in the late 1870s, the equally problematical linkage of science and literature geared Lanier's reading to equally technical needs. They concerned the scientific basis of prosody. Research by an outstanding German physicist, Hermann Helmholtz, his translated study Sensations of Tone (Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik, 1863), proved eminently useful.²⁶ So did Goethe, when eventually seen in this context of the relation of science with literature. At long last, Lanier appreciates in him the man “at once pursuing science and poetry.”²⁷ Such purposeful reading in the German science field had started when Lanier, the consumptive, was preparing a travel guide to Florida and the healing powers of its climate. He was conscientious enough to consult Johann Heinrich Blasius, a contemporary German authority on the medical aspects of meteorology, especially the climatic ones.²⁸

This amazing fragmentation of reception areas is but little counterbalanced by book-mediated total images of Germany, the country and its culture. When toward the early end of his life Lanier's Johns Hopkins University course on the English novel culminated in George Eliot, her work provided in its way for a literary image of Germany. Daniel Deronda conveyed to Lanier impressions of Baden-Baden, Homburg, Frankfurt and Mainz.²⁹ The same novel had rendered a similar service to Emily Dickinson.

3.2

With Dickinson the reader's reception of things German was followed by the creative artist's use of them. With Lanier, however, not only the reader's but also the critic's and the reproductive translator's reception of German literature has to be taken into account.

The critic of German literature and, beyond it, of German philosophy and music blends with their creative user in Tiger-Lilies (1867), Lanier's only novel. But we can catch him primarily as critic in his letters, a good many of them Civil War letters, in his essays, and in his lectures on the English novel. Judgments on individual authors sometimes undergo instructive changes, especially in the case of Goethe and his concept of ‘Persönlichkeit’. As late as 1869 Lanier misinterprets it as egotistical ‘self-culture’.³⁰ Only seldom does he venture a characterization of the whole of German literature or music in a given period. This happens e. g. in a letter written to his wife in 1874. Lanier did not know Nietzsche, almost exactly his contemporary. Nietzsche's sharp eye for what later came to be called the ‘process of secularization’ in 19th century German literature has a surprising analogue in this statement of Lanier's. It is analogous in substance, though contrary in attitude. What is most interesting is that in Nietzsche's as well as in Lanier's case it is triggered by a love-hate relationship with Wagner:

There is a something in it [Wagner's “Rhein-Gold”,—the first part of his great … Tetralogy] or rather a something not in it, which I detest in everything that any German has yet done in the way of music or poetry. I know [not] exactly what to call it, or indeed how to define it. It is … (if I may express it in a very roundabout way) … a sort of consciousness underlying all his earthly enthusiasms (which are not at all weakened thereby), that God has charge, that the world is in His hands, that any bitterness is therefore small and unworthy of a poet. This was David's frame of mind: it was Shakespeare's. No German has approached it, except perhaps Richter.³¹

Lanier, the Presbyterian Christian, the man who, due to his long ongoing fight with tuberculosis knew suffering and near-despair, had come to realize his inner resources, and miss their equivalents in most German authors. Naturally, his knowledge of German literature was selective so that his judgment became onesided.

Lanier, the reproductive recipient in the role of translator, tried his skill on three or probably four poems by Heine, and on a further piece by a poet whose name young Lanier, in his soldier's days, spelled Tanner. As mentioned before (p. 141), a German author of that name has not been located yet. Nor have probable renderings of Goethe's “Die Nähe des Geliebten,” Schiller's “Des Mädchens Klage,” and Heine's “Du bist wie eine Blume.”³² Taken from Neue Gedichte (1844), Heine's “Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt,” with its melodious, informal language, was quite a challenge. Lanier responded to it twice. The more “liberal,” that is less literal, version with its line “Float on the spring-winds to my home” was inappropriately composed in a situation without liberty, i. e. at Point Lookout prison, in a prisoner-of-war camp of the Civil War, in December 1864. The winter season left its imprint in a couplet added by the translator:

          [Floateth a lovely chiming.]
Thou magic-bell, to many a fell,
And many a winter-saddened dell
…(33)

The simplicity of the original language has been replaced by a ‘precious,’ poeticized diction. The compound-epithet and the conventionally archaic touch due to the inflectional morpheme-eth (“Floateth”) are entirely out of place. The second piece from Heine, this time from “Lyrisches Intermezzo” in Buch der Lieder (1827; Book of Songs), may have appealed to Lanier's, the Southerner's, imagination for its two emblematic trees, the pine and the palm. True, in the German original “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam” they symbolize a dreamed-of union of the North and the Orient (“Morning-land” literally renders “Morgen-land”),³⁴ but the erotic and cultural symbolism in the poem may have assumed for the translator a meaning associable with another separation and another dream of union nearer home. Here was a challenge to both, the American in the Southerner and the symbolist in the artist.³⁵

The challenge to the symbolist recurred ten years later, in November 1874. Now, however, it made additional demands on the dramatic and the tragic sense of a would-be translator as well as on his awareness of Germanic myth used for the interpretation and criticism of Western civilization. Initially Lanier responded to the challenge:

I have the Libretto of Wagner's great “Trilogy” [sic], and am going to try to make a contract for translating it during the winter. It is a book of more than four hundred pages.³⁶

The outcome has been told by Arthur O. Lewis in an apt, drily factual, way:

… a surviving copy of Lanier's German-English dictionary has some forty lines of translation from Das Rheingold pencilled on the back fly-leaves.³⁷

Bristling with obvious difficulties, this ambitious project was bound to fail, if not only for that inner resistance Lanier the Christian felt to the world view of Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen.

On a unique occasion Lanier, the reproductive poet, put his limited command of German to productive uses. He composed in German a sonnet on Mrs. Falk-Auerbach, a Baltimore pianist of German descent. He went one better by translating this German poem into his native language.³⁸

This American producer of ‘German’ poetry once joins forces with the creative transformer of knowledge and of criticism of things German. The result is young Lanier's experimental novel Tiger-Lilies (1867).

On its basic, linguistic, level Lanier's knowledge of German concocts a kind of German-American brogue for his two female emigrants from Frankfurt. His familiarity with German literature furnishes German names to three of the major, and to one of the minor figures. “Ottilie” most probably derives from Goethe's Elective Affinities (Die Wahlver-wandtschaften). Felix, changed from a boy's to a girl's name, is presumably borrowed from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship or Travels (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre).³⁹ Rübetsahl originates from “Legenden von Rübezahl,” which Carlyle's translation of J. K. Musäus' Volksmärchen der Deutschen had skipped.⁴⁰ Among the minor figures, Gretchen, Ottilie's maid, who followed her into emigration, clearly owes her name to Faust's beloved. Confederate officer Flemington's name recalls protagonist Flemming in Longfellow's German travel novel Hyperion.⁴¹ Longfellow had chosen the name in homage to German Baroque poet Paul Fleming.⁴² Lanier added to it the English suffix -ton in imitation of surnames transferred from place names.⁴³

This allusiveness of German or partly German names comes to bear on the novel's level of tone. Admittedly, it can be appreciated only by such readers as know the literary sources of these names and are aware of their changed references as well. The resulting tone of comical playfulness, however, more often than not tends to distort the original German literary characters alluded to. It displays Richter's and Tieck's Romantic irony in American Southern operation.

On the level of setting the juxtaposition of America and Germany keeps alive in the reader's mind the binationality of this novel. Goethe's Frankfurt, original home of Ottilie, Gretchen, and Rübetsahl, place of Ottilie's seduction by charming Yankee John Cranston on the one hand, on the other a Germanized place name, “Thalberg”, rendering authentic Montvale, Tenn., in inverted order,⁴⁴ mark the range of action at farthest points.

On the level of figures the German language adds versimilitude to the German characters and to a war in which German immigrants fight on both sides. The central antithetic pair, Yankee Cranston and Southerner Philip Sterling, are largely characterized by their resemblance to German literary figures, and by their own German preferences, literary and musical. Cranston is, in part, modeled on Mephistopheles and on an unredeemed, seductive Faust, while Stirling echoes Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

The German literary work of the same title seems to impinge on the structural level of Tiger-Lilies. There is no end yet to the academic debate on whether Lanier read this unfinished novel in Stallknecht's Cambridge translation of 1842 or, once again, simply relied on Carlyle as informant.⁴⁵ Mediated or not, Novalis' design recurs with interesting modifications. Lanier scholar Garland Greever sums them up this way:

Lanier resembles Novalis in that he shrouds his theme [of spiritual progress toward love] in figurative language, has the [blue] flower stand for love and maintains that love in its spiritual character shall transform and redeem all life. He differs from Novalis in that, whereas the blue flower represents love in its ideal state, tiger-lilies represent it in both its debased and its exalted form.⁴⁶

Structural functions are served by German literature also in more obvious manners. By way of mottoes prefixed to each of the novel's chapters passages taken also from German authors operate as introductive signals for alert readers. Characteristically, Richter and Novalis are entrusted with this service, though only in Book I of the novel, the earliest part written by the young author. Particularly obvious is the framing function of a mythical symbol associated with the basically mythical figure of Rübetsahl. Borrowed by Lanier from Norse mythology, probably via Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1832-35),⁴⁷ the tree symbol of “Ygdrasil,” linking the subterrestrial, terrestrial, and celestial spheres of existence, opens and closes Tiger-Lilies. But the very last sentence of its first and its last paragraph takes over from ancient Hebrew the Biblical formula of “Amen.” Lanier, the Southern Presbyterian, is not that easily overawed by Germanic mythology. The later critic of the world view of Der Ring des Nibelungen, whom we have already met (p. 143), is foreshadowed by the builder of the novel's structure.

All these were meaningful uses of German literary material and German mediatory services. It should be mentioned in passing, however, that less meaningful ones emerge in Lanier's other works. They are merely decorative and occasionally self-advertising, the author displaying his knowledge. Fortunately they are conterbalanced by functional, very modern-looking, ‘montage’-like effects to which Lanier applied his acquaintance with German literature and culture. Instances can be found in his essays and letters as well as in his travel guide Florida (1876).⁴⁸

In the shorter fiction and the poetry, use of German literary themes and motifs is scanty. For example, Fouqué's fairy tale Undine contributes to Lanier's “The Three Waterfalls.”⁴⁹ A late phenomenon in his development of creative contacts with German culture⁵⁰ is the poem dedicated to German composers. Represented by such pieces as “To Beethoven” (1876) and “To Richard Wagner” (1877), this type of poetic expression yields insight into both emotional attitude and scope of understanding.⁵¹

Suffice it to say that all of Lanier's contacts with Germany, involving as they do reading knowledge, critical judgment, reproductive and productive reactions,⁵² persist throughout the fourteen years, and no more, granted Lanier after publication of Tiger-Lilies in 1867. A year later he wrote: “… it is like that I, who have loved Germany all my life, must after all die with only a dream of the child-land.”⁵³ His guess proved correct.

3.3

How does Lanier's Germany compare to Germany's Lanier? Critical reception, based on German reprintings of his works in English, has been scanty. Reproductive reception, i. e. by way of translation, has been scantier still. The lack, not remedied until 1945, of a complete American edition of Lanier's writings and the slow development of biographical research, both descriptive and critical, prevented the German reception from enjoying a more than casual support. The casual one came from a German who had emigrated from Pomerania as a child and was to become America's earliest linguistic structuralist: Edward Sapir (1884-1939). His essay “The Musical Foundations of Verse” (1921) proffers ideas “related to those of Lanier's Science of English Verse (1880),”⁵⁴ but Lanier is not accorded “specific” treatment.⁵⁵ The periodical which had accepted the article was the well-known Journal of English and Germanic Philology, but owing to rapid inflation only a few German scholars may have come across this essay at the time. So German immigrant activities proved inconsequential as, in spite of Austrian immigrant assistance, they had done in Dickinson's case in 1895 and 1898.⁵⁶ The unsettled evaluation of Lanier's achievement, the long-lasting failure to explore his place in the Poe tradition of Southern symbolist poetry or to investigate affinities with French symbolism and European Neo-Romanticism, the ardent intra-Southern debate about his relation to “the new South,” the Southern Agrarians and the “Fugitives” did not improve post-World War I reception either.⁵⁷ Not even such a hospitable international anthology as The Albatros Book of Living Verse edited by American Louis Untermeyer for a publishing company with headquarters in Hamburg, included a single poem of Lanier's, and this as late as 1933.

Nor did a single one of them illustrate those eight lines of description and assessment which in 1929 Walther Fischer, University of Pennsylvania-trained German pioneer of Americanistics, devoted to Lanier in Die englische Literatur der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika [sic]. But his comments mark the belated beginnings of German academic contacts with Lanier. The musician-poet is both praised and blamed, the novelist, the scientific prosodist, the travel writer, and the author of essays on music are disregarded.⁵⁸

In the same year of 1929, however, a German philosopher and psychological student of culture, Count Hermann Keyserling, viewed Lanier from quite a different angle than Professor Fischer had done. Next to Oswald Spengler, this Baltic aristocrat was Germany's most discussed philosopher in the English-speaking world of the 1920s. America Set Free, written in English and published in 1930, was his third success.⁵⁹ In the year before The Atlantic Monthly had published his essay “The South—America's Hope.” According to Keyserling, Lanier, the man's life and work, had built up “a general cultural atmosphere.” In it a “superior human type” could evolve.⁶⁰ This was as laudatory as it was seemingly vague. But on re-reading Lanier's correspondence with his old Macon friend, Swiss-descended Clare deGraffenreid, one does find that German philosopher's assessment borne out by Lanier's efforts for what we nowadays call adult education.⁶¹

“The South: America's Hope” links up with the post-1945 fortunes of Lanier. They, too, advance his reception by readers and critics. Around 1948 a German anthology of American poetry for the first time offers poems by Lanier, including a dialect poem. Credit for this courage goes to Josef Rather's American Poetry: A Critical Anthology (1949).⁶² Biographical information, mainly about Lanier and his Baltimore German environment, was furnished by Dieter Cunz's monograph The Maryland Germans.⁶³ Like Sapir he was a German immigrant peripherally interested in Lanier, but his reference to the Southern musician-poet was just as difficult to come by in 1948 currency-reform Germany as Sapir's article had been in that inflation-ridden Germany of 1921.

Among literary historians and critics Walter F. Schirmer was first to continue what Fischer had begun in 1929. True, his Kurze Geschichte der englischen Literatur was completed and prefaced in 1943, but not published until 1945. It encompassed a brief history of American literature. In it Lanier's demands for a ‘pure music’ and a quantity-based form of verse as well as his novel Tiger-Lilies are mentioned. The poet is placed in the neighborhood of epigonic Thomas Bailey Aldrich while the novelist finds himself in the company of historical romancers such as Daniel Pierce Thompson (The Golden Mountain Boys) and Lewis Wallace (Ben Hur).⁶⁴ It was left to an American, J. Wesley Thomas, to serve as a guide to that aspect of Lanier's life and work which came closest to Germany but had so far been disregarded or undiscovered by German literary historians. Thomas' five-page account of Lanier's relations with German life and letters forms part of Amerikanische Dichter und die deutsche Literatur (1950).⁶⁵ Written in German, this monograph for the first time, acquaints German readers with the historical context not only of Lanier's but also of Dickinson's and a great many other American authors' reactions to German literature and culture. This valuable pilot study, however, seems to have gone unexplored by Lanier's German critics of the 1950s and mid-1960s.

Helmut Uhlig's sketch of American literary history, contributed to the 1952 edition of the manual Amerikakunde, reinforced Schirmer's stress on the musical orientation of Lanier's poetry. It established a link with impressionism but denied Lanier the quality of “dichterischer Gestalter” (‘poetic creator’).⁶⁶ In the same year Swiss-American Henry Lüdeke, in his Geschichte der amerikanischen Literatur, presented what for many years to come was to remain the most comprehensive description and fairest evaluation of Lanier's achievement. Its German elements, however, were narrowed to Carlyle as his guide to German Romanticism.⁶⁷ Two years later Schirmer expanded his Geschichte der englischen Literatur (1937) into Geschichte der englischen und amerikanischen Literatur (1954). Now he relates Lanier's major poems along generic lines to British 17th century ode composers, above all to Dryden. But as in 1945, he emphasizes the epigonic character of the poetry's form. To the tension between it and the modern themes of the poems he adds the tension between Lanier's theorizing on ‘pure music’ and its actual achievement. Revised and enlarged editions of Schirmer's book in 1960, 1967 and 1968 neither revise nor enlarge this picture of Lanier.⁶⁸

This dual task is taken over in 1959 by the German translation of Literary History of the United States (Literaturgeschichte der Vereinigten Staaten) and with it of Stanley T. Williams' contribution “Experiments in Poetry: Sidney Lanier and Emily Dickinson.” The German edition of this monumental work of American literary historiography offers the first four bilingual versions of snippets of Lanier's poetry, and the German version of a passage quoted by Williams from Lanier's Science of English Verse.⁶⁹

In the early 1960s foreign aid arrived from British sources. The German translation in 1961 of Marcus Cunliffe's The Literature of the United States (1954) stressed the Southernness of Lanier, his relationship with Poe and Poe's over-melodiousness as well as Lanier's significance as precursor of modern Southern poetry.⁷⁰ Five years later Ursula Brumm, in the 1966 revision of Amerikakunde and, with it, of Uhlig's contribution, assesses Lanier in terms related to Cunliffe's, i.e. in terms of post-Civil War poets' survival in present-day America's consciousness.⁷¹ Of such survivors she enumerates two: Whitman and Dickinson, but she adds, though with certain reservations, Lanier. The union of the poet with the musician she sees endangered by the precedence of sound patterns over diction and ideas. “The Marshes of Glynn” is singled out as representative of his few poems of evocative power. It is not until almost the end of the decade that a more favorable view is taken of Lanier's success in experimenting on a union of poetry and music. In Wege der amerikanischen Literatur (1968) Martin Schulze, as comprehensively as only Lüdeke before him, treats of Lanier's work. ‘His conscious verse architecture’ and the fusion of musician and poet, for the first time, are given full credit.⁷²

As regards Lanier's Germany, however, even Schulze's awareness is restricted to the young Oglethorpe student under ‘the spell of the ideas of Carlyle and German Romanticism.’⁷³ For a third time it was left to an American scholar, this time to Jack de Bellis, to resume inquiry into a subject that Thomas had taken up first, and Arthur O. Lewis, Jr., had investigated anew in 1957.⁷⁴ De Bellis' “Sidney Lanier and German Romance: An Important Qualification” (1968) ranks as a model of a revisional, rigorously critical study in literary reception and influence. It does not concern itself with Lanier's image of Germany.⁷⁵

German research of the 1970s contributed several new features to the picture of Germany's reception of our Southern author. Among them were a detailed comparison of his poetry to Poe's,⁷⁶ a daring but very brief attempt to relate it to the ‘overstrained euphoria of the consumptive,’⁷⁷ and a close interpretation of one of Lanier's outstanding poems, “The Marshes of Glynn.” This thoughtful analysis, the first ever undertaken by a German, was published in a volume of interpretive essays from several hands. In this framework amounting to an interpretive history of American poetry the German reader was enabled to see Lanier's achievement as part of a tradition extending over almost 350 years.⁷⁸

Even the field of reproductive reception, in the 1970s, began to show signs of increasing cultivation. Herwig Friedl's analysis of “The Marshes of Glynn” reprinted the text of the original and added a well-considered prose rendering.⁷⁹ So did Annemarie and Franz Link when including Lanier's “The Raven Days” in their bilingual anthology Amerikanische Lyrik/Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Genewart (1974) (American Poetry: From the 17th Century Through the Present).⁸⁰ Perhaps not by chance did two persons who had experienced the Second World War and its aftermath select a poem born of the Civil War and its Southern repercussions.

No German poet, however, has as yet felt stimulated to translate Lanier, let alone transmute him, his themes and forms, into a work of her or his own. How different this is from Dickinson's attraction for German translators and the poets among them! …

Notes

1. Stanley M. Vogel, German Literary Influences on the American Transcendentalists, Yale Studies in English, 127 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1955).

2. For instance in A Masque of Poets [ed. George Parsons Lathrop] (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), which published ED's “Success” and SL's “The Marshes of Glynn.” Both were printed unsigned. See ibid., pp. 174, 88-94.

3. They include Texas and New Orleans Germans. See The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson (general editor), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1945), VI, 191, 233, 245; VIII, 320, 331, 241.

4. Mainly Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Schumann. As for language, see Arthur O. Lewis, Jr., “SL's Study of German,” Amer.-Germ. Rev., 22 (1957), 30-32.

5. Politics: “Flag Presentation at Oglethorpe University,” Cent. Ed., V, 197; of later date, “Retrospects and Prospects,” ibid., V, 301. References to Bismarck ibid. and in “Peace,” VI, 247. See Letters, ibid., X, 5: “I … have written … part of an essay on “Beethoven and Bismarck.” Philology: “Shakespere and His Forerunners,” ibid., III, 43; “The Death of Byrhtnoth,” IV, 291.

6. Edd Winfield Parks, SL, the Man, the Poet, the Critic (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1968), pp. 5-6.

7. Ibid., p. 6.

8. Cent. Ed., V, 107.

9. Parks, SL, p. 6.

10. Jack de Bellis, “SL and German Romance: An Important Qualification,” Comp. Lit. Studies, 5 (1968), 145.

11. Ibid., p. 147.

12. See note 106. Other references to Luther in The English Novel, Cent. Ed., IV, 126, 130; in “Retrospects and Prospects,” Cent. Ed., V. 296.

13. Cent. Ed., III, 142. This letter to his father is also of interest for SL's knowledge of, and attitude toward, the German language.

14. The English Novel, Cent, Ed., IV, 200 with reference to George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss; ibid., p. 249, once more with reference to Eliot. Thomas a Kempis is quoted in Letters, ibid., IX, 503 and X, 15.

15. Boston editions in 1863 and 1866. Cf. Arthur O. Lewis, Jr., “SL's Knowledge of German Literature,” Anglo-Germ. and Amer.-Germ. Crosscurrents, ed. Philip Allison Shelley et al., (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1957), pp. 160, 186, notes 17-18.

16. Aubrey H. Starke, SL (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1933), pp. 166-67, 183-84, 204, 217-22, 258, 331.

17. Letters, Cent. Ed., VII, 155: “A kind friend has sent me a Germanbook [sic] containing extracts from various German authors, in the original … in reading it, my thought has been of you—.”

18. Letters, Cent. Ed., IX, 112, 118, 119.

19. He probably read Edward L. Burlingame, tr. Art Life and Theories or Richard Wagner (New York, 1875). See Lewis, “SL's Knowledge of Germ. Lit.,” p. 187, n. 49. He appears to have known Wagner's Beethoven (Leipzig, 1870). See SL's “Wagner's Beethoven,” Cent. Ed., II, 338-39; Lewis, ibid., p. 187. An American ed. of the German original or its transl. was publ. by Schirmer in New York in 1870. Cf. NUC for this ed. and a transl. by Albert R. Parsons (Boston, 1872, Indianapolis, 1872, 1873; New York, 1883, 3rd ed.); cf. also Morgan, Critical Bibliography, p. 498.

20. Letters, Cent. Ed., IX, 102: “‘The Life of Robert Schumann,’ by his pupil [Wilhelm I.] Von Wasielewski.” A passage quoted ibid., pp. 103-04, with its expression of Schumann's appreciation of Jean Paul Richter surely reinforced SL's approval of Richter. Cf. Lewis, “SL's Knowledge of Germ. Lit.,” p. 162.

21. Starke, SL, pp. 284, 302; Cent. Ed., I, 357-58; Dieter Cunz, The Maryland Germans (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1948), p. 344.

22. Lewis, “SL's Knowledge of Germ. Lit.,” p. 180, quotes Cent. Ed., II, 270-71.

23. Ibid., pp. 169-70, 187, n. 33.

24. The English Novel, Cent. Ed., IV, 34. Even Auerbach was SL's senior by thirty years.

25. John T. Krumpelmann, “Bayard Taylor as a Literary Mediator between Germany and the South Atlantic States,” Die Neueren Sprachen, n.s., 9 (1955), 415-18; Bayard Taylor and German Letters, Britannica et Americana. No. 4 (Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter, 1959).

26. Cent. Ed., II, xxix, 25, n.1; 28, 29, 208, n.1; 255, 262, 306, 329; IV, 6; VII, 1; X, 270.

27. The English Novel, Cent. Ed., IV, 34. Lewis, “SL's Knowledge of Germ. Lit.,” p. 169.

28. Johann Heinrich Blasius. Cf. Cent. Ed., VI, 9 and n. But see also William Blasius (1818-99), “Some Remarks on the Connection of Meteorology with Health,” Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc., 16 (Philadelphia, 1875). Florida was publ. in 1876.

29. The English Novel, Cent. Ed., IV, esp. pp. 211-30. Fritz Schultz, Der Deutsche in der englischen Literatur vom Beginn der Romantik bis zum Ausbruch des Weltkrieges, Studien zur Englischen Philologie, No. 95 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1939), 76-77, 102-104, 113. See also the older study of Sibilla Pfeiffer, George Eliots Beziehungen zu Deutschland, Anglistische Forschungen, No. 60 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925).

30. Letter to Virginia Hankins, May 17, 1869, Cent. Ed. VIII, 31; Philip Allison Shelley, “A German Art of Life in America: The American Reception of the Goethean Doctrine of Self-Culture,” Anglo-German and American-German Crosscurrents, vol. 1, pp. 241-292. As for similar but later judgments see Hans Galinsky, “Deutschland in der Sicht von D. H. Lawrence und T. S. Eliot” in his Amerika und Europa (Berlin, 1968), pp. 214, 216, 230. See also Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge UP, 1977).

31. To Mary Day Lanier, Nov 8, 1874, Letters, Cent. Ed., IX, 118. Also quoted in part by Lewis, “SL's Knowledge of Germ. Lit.,” p. 179.

32. Lewis, ibid., pp. 165, 174, 177.

33. “Spring Greeting,” Cent. Ed., I, 5; cf. I, xxviii, n. 23; I, 329. See letter to Mary Day, Jul 1, 1864, Letters, Cent Ed., VII, 155, 155, n. 11. SL or his “Germanbook” wrongly ascribes the poem to Herder. The version printed in Cent. Ed., VIII, 155 is, according to SL, “perfectly literal, almost,” the “liberal” one (ibid.) is in I, 5.

34. “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam,” “Lyrisches Intermezzo,” XXXIII in Heinrich Heine, Werke (Wiesbaden: Löwit, n.d.), I, 147. “Translation from the German of Heine,” Cent. Ed. I, 154; see also I, 368.

35. Of the third poem by Heine, “Der Tod das ist die kühle Nacht,” “Die Heimkehr,” LXXXVII, Buch der Lieder, Werke, I, 213, only lines 2 and 4 were translated. Cent. Ed., VII, 185. See also Lewis, “SL's Knowledge of Germ. Lit.,” p. 177.

36. See also Letters, Cent. Ed., IX, 112. Cf. IX, 118, 119.

37. Lewis, “SL's Knowledge of Germ. Lit.,” p. 179, with reference to Cent. Ed., IX, 112. Cf. IX, 118, 119, but also VI, 51-52.

38. Cent. Ed. I, 117: “To Nannette Falk-Auerbach;” I, 357: “An Frau Nannette Falk-Auerbach.” Starke, SL, p. 310, rates the German version above the English.

39. But see Tiger-Lilies, Cent. Ed., V, xxiii: “‘Felix’ may be reminiscent of Mendelssohn.”

40. For English translation of “Legenden von Rübezahl” (‘legends of Number Nip’) see Morgan, Critical Bibliography, pp. 350-51. Aside from earlier and later ones he lists an 1864 edition.

41. Tiger-Lilies, Cent. Ed., V, xxiv. Cf. ibid., V, xxii-iv, 39, n. [1].

42. James Taft Hatfield, New Light on Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933; rpt. New York: Gordian P, 1970), p. 71, n. 2 refers to “Dannecker's invented remark: ‘You have a German name. Paul Flemming [sic] was one of our old poets.”

43. Hans Marchand, The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation (Munich: Beck, 1969, 2nd ed.), p. 350.

44. But cf. Starke, SL, p. 483, n. 2: “But it is also the name of a musician distinguished in Lanier's day, Sigismund Thalberg, who visited the United States in 1857.”

45. Lewis, “SL's Knowledge of Germ. Lit.,” p. 187, n. 39; De Bellis, “SL and German Romance,” p. 151.

46. “Introduction,” Tiger-Lilies, Cent. Ed., V, xx. This introduction by Garland Greever and the “Introduction” by Richard Harwell to his edition of Tiger-Lilies, Southern Literary Classics Series, ed. C. Hugh Holman and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1969), pp. vii-xxii are informative.

47. Cent. Ed., III, 43 appears to be the only mention of J. Grimm. It refers to his conjectures of the author of The Phoenix. Starke, SL, p. 392, refers to the same. Philip Graham, “L's Reading,” Studies in Engl. (Austin, Tex.), 11 (1931), 63-89, does not list Grimm at all. Morgan, Critical Bibliography, p. 193 includes “Teutonic Mythology. Tr. 4th ed. [of Deutsche Mythologie] Jasper S. Stallybrass (London: Bell, 1880-88), 4 vols.” This translation would have been too late for use in Tiger-Lilies.

48. One of the most illustrative examples can be found in Florida, Cent. Ed., VI, 51-52. Wagner's Rheingold is integrated with the local natural product of Florida oranges as symbols of fertility and with the local fairy-tale motif of Ponce de Leon's search for the spring of eternal youth.

49. “The Three Waterfalls,” Cent. Ed., V, 213-230, esp. p. 213n.

50. Philip Graham and Joseph Jones, A Concordance to the Poems of SL (Austin, Tex., 1939) should be searched for German lexemes. An “Outline” for “Poem. On the women who bore out their husbands on their shoulders, as their greatest treasures, from the captured city,” Cent. Ed. I, 249, did not yield a poem. The subject recalls the story of ‘the women of Weinsberg’ as retold in prose by the Grimms and G. Schwab, in verse by Chamisso, in an unfinished verse drama by Uhland. Wagner's and von Bülow's impact on “The Centennial Meditation of Columbia” (1876), ibid., I, 60-62, esp. its underlying concept of poetry's relation to music, is problematical. This relation is influenced by “the prodigious modern development of the orchestra” (SL's “The Centennial Cantata,” ibid., II, 266). Cf. Edwin Mims, SL (Boston, 1905; rpt. Washington, D.C.: Kennikat P, 1968), pp. 172-73.

51. Cent. Ed., I, 88-90; cf. I, 310-11, 315-16; I, 102-03. Cf. SL's sonnet “Beethoven,” ibid., pp. 201, 351, and “Poem Outlines,” Cent. Ed., I, 258: “no. 94. Beethoven” (3 lines).

52. Reproductive reactions also operate in SL's language. “See-longing” and “sight-yearning” try to render Sehnsucht on the basis of a misunderstood German compound. See letter to Mary Day Lanier, July 16, 1872: “Dost thou know the German word Sehnsucht: i. e. sehen (or seh'n), to see, and sucht, longing—the see-longing, or sight-yearning? So does my sight yearn for thee, …” (Cent. Ed., VIII, 242). A professional flutist, he even produced German names for several of his compositions. Cf. Cent. Ed., VI, 390: “Heimweh Polka,” “Concert Stück,” “Ein Märchen, Song for Flute,” “Fantasie on Schubert's ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied,’” “Sehnsucht,” “Wald-Einsamkeit,” [Tieck?]. As for German linguistic and literary influences, e. g. on SL's “The Symphony,” consult Pochmann, German Culture, pp. 460-61, 776-77, notes 428-38.

53. Letter to Milton H. Northrup, Cent. Ed., VII, 380. Based on the same morphemic pattern as “child-land,” “art-land” is another name for Germany in SL's vocabulary: “the most cultivated art-land, quoad music.” (ibid., IX, 107).

54. Jack de Bellis, SL, Henry Timrod, and Paul Hamilton Hayne: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978).

55. JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 20 (1921), 213-18. See De Bellis, ibid., p. 50.

56. See Lubbers in note 97. Cf. Buckingham, ED: Annotated Bibliography, pp. 185-86; 60, no. 6.115 with reference to the year 1895.

57. Jack de Bellis, SL, TUSAS, no. 205 (New York, 1972), passim.

58. Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Oskar Walzel (Wildpark-Potsdam, 1929), p. 91.

59. Amerika: Der Aufgang einer neuen Welt (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1930).

60. Atlantic Monthly, 144 (1929), 605-08.

61. A. P. Antippas and Carol Flake, “SL's Letters to Clare deGraffenreid,” AL [American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography] 45 (1973), 182-205.

62. I. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, pp. 177-84.

63. Cunz, The Maryland Germans, pp. 338, 343, 344, 410.

64. (Halle: Niemeyer, 1945), pp. 229, 245.

65. (Goslar: Volksbücherei-Verlag, 1950), pp. 111-16; see also pp. 103, 116; as for Dickinson, pp. 103, 110, 111, 118.

66. “Amerikanische Literatur,” in Amerikakunde, Handbücher der Auslandskunde, ed. Paul Hartig and Wilhelm Schellberg (Frankfurt M.: Diesterweg, 1952, 2nd ed.), p. 403.

67. (Berne, 1952), pp. 350-52, 354, 357.

68. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954, 2nd ed.), pp. 150-51; (1960, 3rd ed.), II, 154-55, 183; (1967, 4th ed.), pp. 620-21; (1968, 5th ed.), ibid.

69. (Mainz: Grünewald), pp. 908-16, and passim.

70. Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte (Munich: Piper, 1961), pp. 183, 185, 186-87. It quotes four lines from “The Marshes of Glynn;” German translation on p. 389.

71. “Entwicklungszüge der amerikanischen Literatur,” p. 671.

72. (Frankfurt M.: Ullstein, 1968), pp. 183-85.

73. Ibid., 183.

74. For Thomas see note 166, for Lewis note 116, for De Bellis note 111.

75. This critical attitude continues in Richard Harwell's “Introduction,” Tiger-Lilies: A Novel (see note 147) and in De Bellis's SL (see note 158). I am greatly indebted to it.

76. Herwig Friedl, “Poe und Lanier: Ein Vergleich ihrer Versdichtung,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 15 (1970), 123-40.

77. Rudolf Haas, Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte, vol. 2 (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1974), p. 190.

78. Herwig Friedl, “The Marshes of Glynn,” in Klaus Lubbers, ed., Die amerikanische Lyrik: Von der Kolonialzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1974), pp. 163-75; 442-44 (‘Notes’).

79. Ibid., pp. 163-67.

80. (Stuttgart: Reclam Jr., 1974), pp. 180-81; a bibliography is appended on pp. 484-85.

(ED = Emily Dickinson; P = Press; SL = Sidney Lanier; UP = University Press)