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THE ABSOLUTE NIGHT INVOKED BY THE GERMAN ROMANTIC FRIEDRICH von Hardenberg, better known as NovaUs, might weU have been more influential at the turn of the nineteenth century than previously acknowledged. This image saturating his dithyrambic cycle Hymnen an die Nacht [Hymns to the Night], published in 1800, continues to be read by some in terms of obscure private experiences despite the twentieth-century work of Käte Hamburger, Martin Dyck, and others that show scientific connections.1 This construal is especiaUy popular in the EngUsh-speaking world and has foUowed a long tradition of interpreting Novalis that began with the reviews of essayist Thomas Carlyle. In the late 1820s, Carlyle had tied this poet not just to the medieval German mystic Jakob Böhme but also to what he regarded as the "tenebrific consteUation" of Immanuel Kant and the "Kantists."2 Common readers today tend to merge NovaUs's night more with a state of spiritual loneliness the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross had caUed "the dark night of the soul" ["la noche oscura del alma"]. This inclination is not merely the result of a reUgious metaphor's famiUarity; it derives its understanding from an incident Unked to the poem's inspiration, an epiphany Novalis experienced at the grave of his first fiancée, Sophie von Kühn, on 13 May 1797. 3
The subsequent view that NovaUs's spiritual insight was inextricable from his emotional vulnerability has led several critics to identify a wide range of literary influences. Suggestions include August Wilhelm Schlegel's essay on Romeo and Juliet of 1797, Johann Gottfried Herder's mythic poems, the religious writings of Karl von Eckartshausen and Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, or Jean Paul, and Edward Young's Night Thoughts of 1 742-45/ Young's poem, which had numerous European translations by the end of the eighteenth century, is often cited in view of its thematic resemblance to Novalis's poem and its reputation among German writers such as Herder, Friedrich Gotdieb Klopstock, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.5 Novalis might have turned to this reflection on mortality weeks before his graveside experience, but it seems rather excessive to proclaim Young's direct and deep impact. The British surrealist David Gascoyne expresses the same doubt in his introduction to an English edition of Hymnen an die Nacht translated by...