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Sebastian Kaufmann, "Schöpft des Dichters reine Hand . . Studien zu Goethes poetologischer Lyrik. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011.525 pp.
Kaufmann's meticulously researched volume is a lightly edited dissertation, and the genre is perhaps to blame for the relatively minor flaws in his otherwiseconvincing and wide-ranging study of Goethe's poetological poetry. By "poeto logical poetry," Kaufmann understands poetry that undertakes reflection (in Goethe's case, more individual than universal and more descriptive than normative) on the role or identity of the poet, the process of writing poetry, or the nature of poetry in general (14-15). Kaufmann advances the claim that, contra the scholarship's divisions of Goethe's work into Sturm und Drang, classical, and postclassical periods, Goethe's poetological poetry exhibits a striking thematic consistency in treating poetry as a genre concerned with the symbolic representation of the divine or absolute. Kaufmann argues that Goethe's conception of the divine remains pantheistic throughout his career; poetry's primary task is thus the uncovering of the "offenbarles] Geheimniß" (342) of the divine in nature. While Kaufmann supports this thesis fully in its most abstract form, the volume underdifferentiates between the periods of Goethe's work with regard to the role of the subject in the constellation of Kunst/Gott/Natur: there are significant differences between, say, the oscillations between ecstatic dissolution into nature and depressive isolation from it in Goethe's works from the 1770s and the self-observing observation matched by poetic self-reflection in, say, the West-östlicher Divan. Two other, more minor flaws somewhat obscure but do not detract significantly from the book's argumentation: first, Kaufmann's own claims are frequently...