Content area
Full text
This article compares the poetic means of elevation used by two "national poets," France Preseren and Jónas Hallgrímsson, arguing that the latter elevated both his native country and the vernacular language by using aesthetic models.
Keywords: national literary canon / Slovene poetry / Icelandic poetry / national poets / Preseren, France / Halgrimsson, Jonas / comparative studies
Each of them did what any aspiring "national poet" would try to do in the nineteenth century. They reinvented their native language as a medium of modern poetic thought and expression. They introduced Italianate forms such as the sonnet and the ter2a rima into the national repertoire. They voiced the cause of their nation and tried to rally their countrymen around it. They wrote a "national epic," looking back to a crucial period in their nation's history but mythologizing it at the same time, emphasÌ2ing its former glory and democratic principles. They were part of a close circle of patriotic intellectuals that published their writings in a new literary journal. However, their life and work was also beset with similar troubles and paradoxes. They could be sarcastic about their lot and about the foreign power that suppressed their nation, but enjoyed education in its universities (in Vienna and Copenhagen, respectively) and versified willingly in the oppressor's tongue (German and Danish). They were each unhappily in love with a woman they could never obtain and sublimated her in their exquisite poetry. They drank too much and produced convivial festive poems that are still sung. They were celebrated as poetic geniuses in their time, but even more so after their untimely deaths. Poetry was not their profession, however: one was a lawyer, the other a geologist. In the end, though, each was canonized as a "national poet" and gradually became a "cultural saint," to quote a concept that articles in this periodical put to the test. They even received their own statues in the center of the capital of their respective countries. One lived in Slovenia, the other in Iceland. One was called France Preseren, the other Jónas Hallgrimsson. They were near contemporaries: the Slovenian was born in 1800, dying in 1849; the Icelander was born in 1807, dying in 1845. Nonetheless, they never met and neither knew of...