A Study of Wandering As a Phenomenon In English and German Literature

By Julian Scutts

This study considers why words based on the common root of the verbs 'to wander' and 'wandern' are so prominent in the works of Goethe and the German and English Romantics. What can one infer from the phenomenon and what method should one use to unravel its mysteries. The author attempts to answer this and other questions. Finally, what does wandering reveal about the relationship of literature to the non-literary world beyond it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326412708

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A Study of Wandering As a Phenomenon In English and German Literature

A STUDY OF WANDERING AS A PHENOMENON IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN POETRY

A Series of Studies that Focuses on the Writings of J. W. von Goethe and the Romantic Poets Drawing in such Topics as the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Issue of Mimesis in Literature

By Julian Scutts

©julianscutts_2014

CONTENTS

On the Title of the Book (5)

Preface (10)

I: In Principio Erat Verbum

A. The Word in Language Theory (22)

B. The Confines or Scope of Comparisons between Words of Similar Form in Literary Texts (with Special Regard to Words Derived from the Verbs to wander and wandern) (33)

C: Words, Words, Words The Application of a Logocentrically Based Method to Works by Shakespeare and Altarwise by Owl-Light by Dylan Thomas (42)

II: Goethe the Wanderer

A: Der Wandrer as the Word that Marked the Culmination of  Eighteenth-Century Trends (80)

B. On the Problem of Two Wanderers in Goethe’s Pre-Weimar Years and How Goethe Met its Challenge (91)

C. From the Heights of Parnassus to the Artist's Humble Workshop in Rome (94)

D. The Pivotal Role of Der Wandrer in the German-English Cultural Dialogue (109)

E. From Werther to Faust Part II or The Wanderer's Short and Long Road to Eternity (125)

F. The Dialogic Essence of Wandrers Nachtlied (137)

III: Wandering in Romanticism

A. I wandered lonely as a cloud, The Myth of Narcissus and Milton’s Muse (154)

B. All Wandering as the Worst of Sinning: The Miltonic Background of Don Juan by Lord Byron (166)

C: London by William Blake and Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust by Wilhelm Müller:   Contexts in Poems that Belong to a Cycle (170)

D: Romantic Treatments of the Wandering Jew and the Prodigal Son / with Reference to Robinson Crusoe, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Queen Mab (183)

IV: WANDERING AFTER GOETHE: The Poetry of Robert Browning and the Tale of the Pied Piper (with Regard Paid to Verbal Clues such as wander and cross)

Part I

A. Robert Browning, Wandering and Goethe (210)

B. Did Isaac Nathan Provide a Channel of Influence between Byron and Robert Browning? (214)

C. The Allegorical Depth of How they Brought the Good  News from Ghent to Aix (217)

D. The Twice-Crossed Bridge in By the Fire-Side  (220)

E. Do We Need Rats to Make Sense of the Story of the Pied Piper? (225)

F. The Religious and Solar Symbolism Implied by Individual Words and their Combined Effects in Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin (234)

Part II

A. Gilgamesh, Samson, Ulysses, Aeneas and the Pied Piper Considered as Solar Heroes (251)

B. Allegorical Substrata in Richard III and Macbeth (256)

C. Hamelin Revisited (262)

V: Essays on Aspects of Literary Criticism Pertaining to Wandering

A. Spilt Theology – or: Why Literary Critics Can't Help Making References to  Wandering (282)

B. Exploring Connections between Dante's Hermeneutic Strategy and  the Fourfold Categories Set out by M. H. Abrams, to which the Terms Mimetic, Pragmatic, Expressive and Objective Apply (298)

C. From Hoffman to Heydrich: Is Collective Schizophrenia Mirrored in Post-Romantic

Literature and Art? (307)

VI.  My Wanderings in the World of Academics

A. Parthian Shots (317)

B. A Wandering Student: London, Cologne, Austin Texas (319)

C. Per Aspera ad Astra (355)

D.  An Essay (Why Somerset Maugham did not envy God on Judgment Day) and Some Poems (358)

Bibliography (374)

CHAPTER I

On the Title of this Book

There are two ways of approach to the task of ordering subject matter that one thinks important enough to present to potential readers or listeners. Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, the dictum formulated by René Descartes, offers a perfect case of a statement that is both readily comprehensible and the starting point of an extensive discourse, indeed one that marked a turning point in the history of philosophy. We cannot be quite so sure about what served as the starting point of Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation. If that anecdotal apple really dropped on Sir Isaac's head while he was resting under an apple tree, pure chance spurred him on the course that led to his fully formulated theory of gravitation. There have also been discoveries that resulted from a false supposition. To cite one of the most famous cases of such a discovery, Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas when he thought he was en route to India. It is an unavoidable and for some uncomfortable truth that the mind’s capacity to recognize patterns exceeds by far the mind’s capacity to explain the patterns that intrude into the field of consciousness, sometimes like uninvited guests.

The closing lines of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Years) point to the occurrence of inadvertent discoveries in the statement that Saul the son of Kish looked for his father's asses but found a kingdom. Faust, perhaps the greatest wanderer of all in modern world literature was the LORDS's servant in all his dark and erring ways as the Divine Voice prophesies in the Prologue in Heaven at the opening of Goethe's dramatic masterpieces Faust Part I and Faust Part II. Is he then to be compared to  the Prodigal Son, who after straying far down the path to ruin returns to his father's house? It is explicitly as a Wanderer that Faust at last enters Heaven and in a rare convergence of literary opinion both the Goethe expert Professor L.A. Willoughby and the specialist in English Romanticism Geoffrey Hartman independently choose to call Faust a Wanderer.  The road to discovery is open to those whose chief merit lies in their being on the move but not necessarily sure of their destination, of being wanderers, in other words.

The word wandering brings various thoughts to mind  some of which are not altogether positive for they carry associations with much that is nebulous, erratic and derogatory. How then can it be defined for the purposes of discussion? In one respect wandering  offers  a solid basis for investigation. It is a word and as such can be recorded whenever it appears,  in a poem, a book or in any other literary form. Wandering from a linguistic point of view  includes  any word derived from a root that underlies the verbs to wander in English and wandern in German and among these the word wanderer is particularly noteworthy  in the domain of poetry. This root is shared by words that denote turning and changing and entail therefore a contrast of at least two points or conditions, a fact which underlies a pervasive  and inherent aspect of wandering which concerns fundamental dualities and the  the dynamic processes they generate.

The initial basis of this series of studies is provided by an article written by a noted scholar in the field of German literature, Professor L. W. Willoughby. In The Image of the ‘Wanderer’ and the ‘Hut’ in Goethe’s Poetry he noted the insistent frequency with which the word Wanderer  often in close proximity to the word Hütte, occurred in Goethe’s poetry and indeed throughout his works generally.[1] This frequency he explained as the welling up of images produced by the collective unconscious postulated by C. G. Jung. In this connection he referred to the wanderer as one who symbolizes the quest of the libido to achieve union with the anima, its feminine counterpart within the psyche. On the other hand he noted that the same word Wanderer, when it appeared in early writings by Goethe, played a central and poignant role in lending expression to the anguish aroused by extreme self-consciousness, the feeling of being torn between two ways of understanding his identity as a poet. [2]

From this fact alone it emerges that wandering  is bound up with deep questions  concerning the  nature of the mind, especially regarding the poles of the unconscious and self-consciousness, a conclusion which Geoffrey H. Hartman corroborated in his essay Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-consciousness’. [3] Geoffrey H. Hartman referred to the Ancient Mariner as a ‘Wanderer on basis of recognizing his  affinity with the figure of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew." Like Willoughby he saw references to the wanderer as a symptom of the acute form  of self-consciousness which profoundly affected poets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Paradoxically this concurrence exposes a fundament  controversy in literary criticism on the  cardinal issue  as to whether literature constitutes a self-contained autonomous area or whether it is  intertwined with nonliterary realities in the domains of history, society, biography, etc. Willoughby affirmed the inextricability of Goethe’s literary creativity with the course of his life and the world around him while Hartman claimed that Goethe, recognizing a  discrepancy between the language of poetry and the demands of a new progressive era, gave up poetry for prose, a thesis for which I find scant evidence. In a similar and decidedly dogmatic vein Harold Bloom asserted that the quest for the libido to achieve union with the anima found its ultimate realization in poems by Wordsworth and Blake, after which climax the art of poetry was doomed to decline and wither away. [4] This proposition stands in direct opposition to Willoughby’s assertion that the selfsame psychological quest informed and integrated Goethe’s art and his interaction with the world around him. It seems then that any discussion of wandering plunges us into the maelstrom of philosophic and literature-related controversies of the greatest magnitude.

The articles by  Willoughby and Hartman offer two approaches to the project of contending with the phenomenon of wandering. Following  Willoughby’s’ lead one can study and compare  poems in which  words in  wanderer family are found; alternatively one can choose to study a poem which one deems to be thematically related to  wandering in some way; on this basis Hartman equated the Ancient Mariner with   the Wandering Jew although the word wanderer is nowhere to be found in this poem. Nor is it, for that matter in the Anglo-Saxon poetic saga commonly entitled The Wanderer on the strength of a scholar’s assessment of this poem’s overriding theme in the nineteenth century. [5] In fact the expression the Wandering Jew most probably arose from the concept of le juif errant. Incidentally, Milton seems to have been interested in cross-language equivalents of the verb to wander from a philological point of view to judge from lines in Paradise Lost. [6]

On the basis of Jung’s theory of the unconscious we have no great problem identifying the renowned wanderers of antiquity  in Gilgamesh, Ulysses and other solar heroes, those archetypal wanderers who in the annals of mythology followed the course of the sun through the realm of night in search  of the eternal female, whose prime symbol is the moon. On the basis of this model combined with a scrutiny of key words I will include the Pied Piper of Hamelin within the ambit of solar wanderers.

My recourse to literary  theory should not overtax the patience of readers who distrust high-flown technical terms. Initially a review of literary opinions will throw light on aspects of wandering and reasons why research into this phenomenon has been stunted despite wandering‘s central and undeniable importance. My focus on linguistic theories has the purpose of  securing a method to be applied to a close study of literary texts. Only later, after assessing material on the basis of a hermeneutic method, can I allow myself the liberty of contemplating some overall anatomy of criticism.

Doubtlessly, objections have cropped up in the minds of readers concerning some of the assertions I have made. In terms of a dictionary the word Wanderer in German is  usually not the equivalent of wanderer in English. What goes for prose does not always go for poetry, where  the single most obvious meaning of a word counts less than its aggregate effect. For this reason, I argue, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated the title of Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied as Wanderer’s Night-Songs. Recourse to language theory will enable me to be more explicit on this question.

The common root of wandern and to wander  point to the sense of turning and changing. Turning and changing imply a contrast between two positions and states, thus lending a binary logic to the underlying significance of wandering. To this I see a connection with the philosophy of yin and yang and Goethe’s system of didactic thought to which the term Steigerung  refers. According to this principle contrasts and tensions generate a progressive force that strives for reconciliation and harmony and for the progressive dissolution of limitations and barriers. In contrast to verbs which in the normal way denote physical movement such as to travel (but may also serve as metaphors for mental activity) to wander indicates, without bias, a correlation between the motions of the mind and those of body.  Here may lie the reason that wandering presents a challenge to all forms of compartmentalization and with the consequent denial of the relevance of literature to  life and to the quest for truth. It is also pivotal in the ease with which it recalls themes and subject matter but also the modes in which subject matter is organized, as Lord Byron must have known when he formulated the passage that introduces the following section of  this book.

PREFACE

My way is to begin with the beginning;

The regularity of my design

Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning,

…                                                     Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto 1, 7th. stanza, lines 3-4

If one were to fail to appreciate that Lord Byron had his tongue in his cheek when writing the lines cited above, one might conclude from them that he had adopted the posture of some university don of the stricter sort who demanded from his students a logical exposition of a given subject that would start from a clearly defined proposition containing exact definitions of all the terms contained in that position. Failure to do would amount to evidence of criminal intent.

Anyone nurturing the ambition to write a learned thesis is expected to define the terms stated in a chosen title at the outset. Wandering is particularly resistant to being defined, and as Lord Byron implied by calling all wandering the worst of sinning, it is suspect in the minds of many people, academicians included. However, derivatives of the verb to wander cannot be readily ignored by readers of English poetry, still less by those who take an interest in German poetry, in which derivatives of the verb wandern could not be more prominent than they are. My interest in wandering in the sense I have signified was originally encouraged by an article written over half a century ago by Professor L. A. Willoughby entitled The Image of the Wanderer and the Hut in Goethe’s Poetry. [7] In this Professor Willoughby made no mention of parallel developments on the side of English poetry or even on that of German Romantic poets in whose works occurrences of the word Wanderer were hardly less prominent than in those of Goethe.

Professor Willoughby attributed the insistent frequency of the word Wanderer throughout Goethe’s poetry and other writings to the power and influence of the collective unconscious in accordance with its formulation in the Jungian theory of psychology. This states that the libido is engaged in a perpetual quest to achieve unity with the anima, thus harmonizing the male and female principles that reside in the human psyche. Professor Willoughby gave no explanation as to why the ubiquitous collective unconscious should suddenly give rise to the phenomenon constituted by the frequency of the word Wanderer in Goethe’s poetry.

Jung took great account of the etymology of crucial words. What can the common root of the English and German verbs to wander and wandern reveal about the phenomenon of wandering? This root is shared by the words to wend and wenden (German ‘to turn") and Wandel (German to change).  Acts of changing and turning entail the possibility of recognizing a distinction between two or more conditions or locations, thus producing  something analogous to a binary code, simple in principle yet highly complex in effect, hence the ambivalence of wandering, its positive or negative import depending on what one turns from and what one turns towards. Both Cain and a pilgrim are termed wanderers; the former stands for one who turns away from good and the latter is one who turns toward a spiritual goal. When designating a state of mind wandering ranges in meaning from references to madness to those of the highly poetic.

Many verbs denoting  motion can become symbols of mental processes. Wandering may denote physical  movement but at its deepest level  it underlies thought and like dreaming remains in large part inaccessible to inquiry  except via  a hermeneutic exposition of its aftereffects.  Wandering  lies at the cusp of manifold antimonies that concern, philosophy, religion and literature, such antimonies including the relationship between body and mind, internal and external reality, and, most relevant to the present discussion, literature and life.

Willoughby traces the use of wanderer and hut imagery to an impulse that springs from the collective unconscious postulated by C, G. Jung regarding  the quest of the libido to find equipoise in the union with the anima. Harold Bloom sees the same force at work as the wellspring of Romantic poetry in England which in the view of his close associate Hartman justifies the term Wanderer as an epithet for the modern self-conscious poet. Geoffrey H.  Hartman refers  several times to the wanderer or Wandering Jew as an epithet for the poet or the process of writing poetry in the Romantic period in his article entitled: Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness,' [8]  Coincidentally or not, he shares Professor Willoughby’s view  that Faust is a Wanderer. A proposcoincidences, Harold Bloom, a close associate with Hartman in the field of studies concerned with English Romanticism, agrees with Willoughby that the quest of the libido to achieve union with the anima impels the poetic imagination but in stark contrast to Willoughby’s assertion that the effect of this quest permeates both poetry and the life of the poet Bloom stresses his belief that the same quest is exclusively internal :in nature.

Both Hartman  and Bloom. discuss the Romantic period as that juncture when poets were no longer assured of the authority of religious doctrines  but still needed images and symbols drawn from religious tradition to serve the purpose of poetic self-expression. Hartman is the more guarded on  the question as to whether the Romantics’ break with past tradition was absolute,  to judge from  the words or even in the following sentence. There clearly comes a time when art frees itself from its subordination to religion or religiously inspired myth and continues or even replaces them. Harold Bloom   for his part  leaves no room for doubt on this subject.

Hartman takes the figure of the wandering Jew as a prime example of a religiously inspired myth that supplied  the Romantics  with a metaphor illuminating the nature of their isolation and their need to contend with the burden of extreme self-consciousness.  The legend of the wandering Jew conveys a sense of an unrelenting  affliction of the mind while the concept of wandering  makes palpable the abstract idea of a perilous transition from Nature through  Self-Consciousness to the Imagination when pictured as a journey (or a voyage in the case of the Ancient Mariner). This threefold matrix evinces a striking congruity with the traditional triad of Eden, Fall and Redemption, whereby the latter merges into the former. Again Hartman does not commit himself  outright to a statement that the old triad is replaced totally by the new in line with the observation that the Romantics themselves did not seek to abolish religion but to redeem it. On the other hand he concedes that the journey to the imagination does not arrive at  what is commonly seen as truth (which is not quite the same as truth itself).

Unlike Willoughby Hartman does not overlook the general historical background of the period in which the matter of the self-conscious poet became urgent, for he argues that the problem of overcoming self-consciousness has been with humanity from the dawn of civilization in one form or another and religious traditions sought to institutionalize various solutions. What marked the Romantic period was the acute intensity of the issue after the failure of French Revolution to meet the hopes and aspirations of Romantic poets who had yearned for a terrestrial paradise. Disappointment led to an inward looking concern with individual and private concerns, which in turn induced a heightened manifestation of self-consciousness. In the case of Coleridge’s Rime the figure of the wanderer approaches that of the poet as both are storytellers who resubmit themselves to temporality and are compelled to repeat experiences in the purgatorial form of words. Further to this point I add: the notion that the act of writing poetry produces an emanation of the self is well  illustrated by a poem by Goethe entitled Ilmenau," according to the narrative of which Goethe encountered himself as he had been as the young man who  had freshly  arrived in Weimar. According to Hartman the solution to the problem of healing the condition of extremeself-consciousness lay in somehow wafting through or over  the divide between self and self  by reviving a past dream, attaining a refinement of knowledge and by reliance on  the emergence of a higher or sublime selfhood that proceeded from the depths of the mind, possibly from  what we now call the unconscious. Without fully clarifying this question Hartman noted that the English Romantics were better able than their German fellow poets  to preserve a sense of continuity with literary tradition and thus revive the vision of poets who had  sensed  a wholeness that transcended the limits imposed by self-consciousness. For Goethe and the German Romantics at least the poetic form of art had reached its limits and the way ahead for literature lay in the areas of prose and language suited to the temper of a rational age. It is not clear whether this death of poetry was to prove universal or remain limited to the German-speaking area though without a clarification to the contrary we may well assume that Hartman meant it was general in its scope.

Bloom is emphatic and unequivocal  in his pronouncement of  the death of poetry that inevitably ensued after  the unsurpassable achievements of William Wordsworth and  William Blake which gave proof of   the full union of the libido and the anima in a process for which the words in poetry had served merely as scaffoldings. [9] Here we trace evidence of a general trend in literary criticism to downplay the role of words in their own right as a vital element in poetry. A reaction against the supposed aggrandizement of the poet at the expense of a close examination of the intrinsic value of individual poems set in during the twentieth century and led to the rise of New Criticism and other schools of opinion that denied that poetry made any significant statements about the worlds of history, society or even the personal attitudes of those who composed poetry. The normal function of language to refer to such realities was seen to have no part in the words that composed any poetic work. Words in this analysis were no more than the raw material that should be fashioned into images, symbols, quasi-musical effects, essentially into entities based on analogies drawn from the non-verbal arts of painting, music and sculpture. There have been many learned expositions and definitions as to the exact characteristics of images, motifs, conceits, allegories and personae, but one thing is for sure. Poems are made of words.

In times when church doctrines exerted an overriding influence deviation from orthodoxy and with this the notion of wandering carried preponderantly negative associations with sinning and heresy but in the course of the eighteenth century a strong countertrend reflected by developments in literature set in. Evocations of Cain, Ahasuerus, the Prodigal Son and pilgrimage came to serve the aesthetic and psychological needs of Goethe and the Romantic poets. Deviation took on a highly positive association with freedom from literary conventions and it is no accident that Edward Young’s essay entitled Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) praising the abandonment  of the beaten road shortly preceded Goethe’s Rede zum Shakespeares Tag, in which the word Wanderer made its first significant appearance in Goethe’s writings, for in this Shakespeare  was adulated as the greatest of wanderers (der grösste Wandrer) on the strength of the sheer range and scope of his dramatic powers and imagination.

The figure of Faust incorporated characteristics of the rebellious Cain and the forgiven penitent who is finally received into eternity as the ‘Wanderer," so named in the final scene of Faust II. In this case wandering involved more than a contrast of contraries but also a dynamic working towards their reconciliation. Just as in Thomist theology the felix culpa committed by Adam and Eve in Paradise  is the  prerequisite for redemption so  the negative aspect of Faust’s aberrant wandering is transcended by the positive aspect of wandering as a process of healing and reconciliation that culminates in the union of the libido and he anima, in Goethe’s words, das Ewig-Weibliche,.

Wandering encapsulates the principle  which Goethe ascribed to the relationship between   Polaritat and Steigerung (polarity and ascent to a transcendental level). In the words of Angus Nicholls  in Erläuterung zu dem aphoristischen Aufsatz die Natur: Goethe contends that out of the attraction and collision of polarities,’Steigerung’  (intensification and ascent) is achieved, through which the two hitherto divided principles are momentarily united at a higher level. [10] Nicholls argues that Goethe’s concept differed from Hegel’s system of dialectics in rejecting any notion that polaric tensions find harmony in some abstract ideal but rather attributed to these tensions  a never ending creative dynamic acting on the mind and imagination as realized by art and literature. Though William Blake may seem to be  the English Romantic poet with the least in common with Goethe, he shared with Goethe the firm conviction that true progress proceeds from the tension between contraries.

While in the person of Faust the aberrant or centrifugal aspect of wandering is subsumed by its higher aspect, the same antithesis is shown by the contrast between separate individuals  in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, a work which in the view of Friedrich Schlegel shared with the French Revolution the claim to being the chief factor that gave rise to the German Romantic movement. A consideration of this aspect of the novel will allow us to extend the scope of enquiry beyond Willoughby’s survey of the Wanderer in Goethe’s works to include a discussion of the relationship between Goethe’s understanding of the role of poets and that of the Romantics, a question that impinges closely on our study of wandering.

The novel tells the story of a group of actors and entertainers who are members of a Wanderbühne, a peripatetic theatrical company. The leading actor, Wilhelm Meister, exemplifies progress and consistency of purpose by meeting what Goethe saw as the need for poets and artists to fulfil a positive and practical mission in society. By contrast Mignon, a female troubadour, and the bearded Harfner (Harpist) exhibit aberrant and even mentally distraught characteristics which were partly responsible for their untimely and tragic deaths. The novel played a major role in promoting the rise of the German Romantic movement with the paradoxical outcome that the Romantic poets adopted the word Wanderer as the epithet chosen to identify themselves as poets and yet rejected the kind of wandering that Wilhelm Meister stood for, siding with Mignon and the harp player, who in their view had been unfairly punished for evincing romantic proclivities. Willoughby also held that the early deaths of the romantic Mignon and the harper showed Goethe’s disapproval of their irresponsible behavior and romantic trends. Willoughby placed the r of romantic in the lower case but clearly an association with Romantic seems to have slipped into his thinking. Goethe must have had truly prophetic powers if he condemned a movement which had yet to come into existence and would do so  at his own instigation. Professor Friedrich Gundolf held that both kinds of wanderer sprang from within Goethe himself and reflected the dichotomies between the unconscious and awakened processes of the mind and imagination, [11] One should not confuse the moralistic with the aesthetic and psychological aspect of the polarity that adheres in wandering.

Can the scope of this inquiry extend even outside the German-speaking world to poetry written in English? Jonathan Wordsworth, a descendent of William Wordsworth, draws attention to a direct link between Goethe’s poetic dialogue entitled Der Wandrer and the figure of the Wanderer in William Wordsworth’s long poem entitled The Excursion.[12] Coleridge drew Wordsworth’s attention to a translation of Der Wandrer in English, the work of William Taylor of Norwich.  In this the German Wandrer is echoed by the English Wanderer in the title and in marginal references to the speakers. In fact Der Wandrer played a pivotal role in the cultural interchange between English and German literary developments. It imparted influence and was itself a reflection of English influences on Goethe, as Goldsmith’s The Traveller provided a source of inspiration for Der Wandrer. In his translation of a poem included in James  Macpherson’s Ossian Goethe translated traveller as Wanderer with the sequel that the same quotation appears in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers: Morgen wird der Wandrer kommen, kommen,.. [13] It is noteworthy that William of Norwich did not choose traveller or a word such as wayfarer as the English equivalent  of Wanderer. Was this the reason for this the same one that led Longfellow to  translate Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied as Wanderer’s Night-Songs? I will raise this question in due course.

The noun Wanderer is prominent in German Romantic poetry just as it is in Goethe’s. The unqualified title Der Wandrer heads poems by Friedrich Schlegel and Hölderlin.[14] The word wanderer in English Romantic poetry   does not enjoy such prominence though it is the byname of Alistor and Childe Harold ans appears in Shelley’s apostrophe to the moon as bright Wanderer in Lines written in the Bay of Lerice, and Wordsworth’s reference to the Wanderer in my Soul  in The Tale of the Wandering Jew. The poetic implication of wandering in English Romantic poetry is suffused though words derived from the verb to wander. When Shelley lamented the death of Keats in Adonais (IX) he wrote: ..the quick Dreams, / The Passion-winged Ministers of thought, /…wander not- /Wander no more from kindling brain to brain,.. In non-poetic language one might say:  Keats was no longer able to compose poetry and communicate his thoughts.

William Blake’s contrast between cold earth wanderers and the mental traveller  reflects a somewhat reserved attitude to the kind of wandering he discerned in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, an indication that, as in contemporary German poetry, poets distinguished between what they considered as the greater or the lesser manifestations of the wanderer (poetry). The Wanderer should therefore never be understood as a poetic conceit or blanket term. Further evidence that poetic achievement was gauged in terms of the perceived quality of wandering is to be drawn from passages in Lord Byron’s Don Juan. In Canto XL Byron chides Juan as a youth who wander’d by the glassy brooks / Thinking unutterable things. Inevitably a reference to Wordsworth crops up a few lines later. The speaker in The Dedication had already confessed that as one wand’ring with  pedestrian Muses he could not contend with Southey on his winged steed, alluding to lines in Book VII, (viii) in Paradise Lost, in which the words flying steed and erroneous there to wander find a place. [15] Byron invested wandering with deep significance when it broached matters of deepest concern to himself, as the last two lines in Canto 3, 70  in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage disclose: But there are wanderers o'er Eternity /Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor'd ne'er shall be.

In various instances Byron showed himself to be keenly aware of uses that Milton had made of the verb to wander in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. We have just noted that in Book VII  of Paradise Lost that the speaker expresses  fear that he might be thrown from the flying steed of inspiration and wander forlorne. Goethe would later express a similar fear of stalling in flight in Wandrers Sturmlied, which could indicate that Milton had a premonition of the coming crisis of self-consciousness with which Goethe and the Romantic poets had to contend head on. It seems probable that the impulse from Goethe had jolted the cultural memory of the English Romantics so as to remind them that the verb to wander had played a significant role in their native tradition. Take Shakespeare’s choice of the words derived from the verb to wander.

In Julius Caesar there is a line which implicitly associates the Poet Cinna with the act of wandering from his home only to meet his death at the hands of a mob which confused him with Cinna the Conspirator before they their error and comment sardonically that the poet deserved his death anyway on account of his bad verses. Cinna had experienced a prophetic dream in which Caesar appeared to him saying that they would dine together. Here we find an indication that wandering implied the ideal concord between  poet and emperor  in keeping with Petrarch’s  ideal of the union of the two laurel crowns. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream wandering appears at its most felicitous in its embodiment in Puck, that merry wanderer of the night, which is understandable in the light of the theory of Jung that the ancient wanderers in mythology and classical epics represent solar wanderers as symbols of  the quest of the libido to achieve union with the anima.

If we accept Willoughby’s thesis that collective unconscious causes verbal patterns to well up anywhere within the ambit of its influence, we may conjecture that the association of wanderer and night in  A Midsummer Night’s Dream  and the title of one of Goethe’s most celebrated poems is no coincidence. Wandrers Nachtlied has secured its place in the anthology of German poetry as the prime example of exquisite lyricism and short verse. Longfellow’s translation of the poem’s title as Wanders Night-Songs strengthens the argument that for poets writing in English and German the words Wandrer and wanderer are not only similar in appearance but constitute a unity as one word, a conclusion to which William of Norwich’s translation of Der Wandrer had already pointed.

True, in terms of a dictionary, to wander and wandern are not exact equivalents, but in order to specify if the word Wanderer is to be translated as wayfarer, pilgrim, migrant or hiker, one requires a clear context by which to single out the appropriate equivalent  among a range of possibilities. [16] In the case of Wandrers Nachtlied it is no easy matter to correlate the word Wanderer with an overriding theme to be found in the body of the two poems that share the title of  Wandrers Nachtlied."   In neither is there a reference to a journey or a geographic destination, nor anything that might point us to a dramatic figure or persona as in the case of Der Wandrer. The second poem could be treated as a description of a landscape viewed by a nocturnal traveller but for this supposition there is no conclusive evidence. The Wanderer could be treated as a pilgrim though life like Werther as there is an echo of the Lord’s Prayer in the first poem but such an interpretation does not exhaust all possibilities presented by the poem. No particular meaning of this word has precedence over any other. The question of finding the exact English equivalent of the German word Wanderer is in any case one that might arise in the area of  nonliterary prose for here a reader or listener ascertains the one meaning of each word that accords with an overall message or plain narrative. No such precise and conclusive definition arises  in poetry as here understanding the immediately obvious meaning of a word is but the beginning of an ever widening exploration of its deeper meanings, associations and resonances, which in the case of wandering ultimately reveal facets of the creative imagination.

Only the word wanderer in English comprehends the range of associations conveyed by the title Wandrers Nachtlied. Here its multivalence is its virtue. In as far as wandering is predicated on the representation of a journey or excursion, its centre of interest does not lie so much in the respective  itinerary itself as in what takes place at a decisive turning point along the way (cf, Wendepunkt) instilling a moment of insight and recognition, be this inspired by a spellbinding nightscape, the breathtaking view of a host of golden daffodils or the perception of beautiful  sea-serpents by the light of the moon. Wandering is primarily about the impulse to reconcile contraries and antitheses, hence its  intimate involvement in acts of perception that mediate between  the inner mind and  the physical world with  its hills, trees and daffodils.

From a linguistic point of view Wandrers Nachtlied shows that the shorter the poem is, the denser and more vibrant become the few words that compose it, as the reader is commensurately less distracted by any specific function  of the word dependent on an unambiguous meaning with reference to some person, thing or subject. For this reason a section of this study is devoted to the language theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and the findings of Juri Tynjanov based on de Saussure’s distinction between the two aspects of language termed  langue and parole. The specific occurrence of a word retains its connection with the unity that combines all words of like  meaning and appearance, from which it follows that a word set within a poem  occupies the midpoint of several contextual planes beginning with the narrow semantic context that the mind of a reader or listener instinctively seeks and concluding with the context set by  literary tradition and even by the scope of the receptive  mind itself.

What does all this this mean for the course of discussion throughout the rest of this study?

A comparison of those critics who have noted that a central significance attaches to the word wanderer will serve to confirm that the scope of wandering encloses instances of words derived from the verbs wandern and to wander in German and English literature. There follows a survey of critical theories concerning the nature of poetic language and the foundation of textual criticism. A major section of the book contains studies of poems and literary works in which derivatives of the verbs to wander and wandern are found. This study continues from where Willoughby left off, though in a more rigorous and systematic manner. The scope broadens to include poems which treat archetypal figures that can be meaningfully identified as wanderers for reasons that will have emerged from earlier analyses. Finally a position will be taken on the issues concerning basic relationships such as that between literature and life; wandering, as I argued earlier, is about fundamental relationships including the most basic one of all, that of  the unconscious and conscious zones of the mind.

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[1] L. A. Willoughby, The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry, Etudes Germaniques, 3, Autumn 1951.

[2] In Goethe’s mind the word Wanderer was painfully ambiguous as it betokened both Shakespeare, his source of inspiration, and himself, known to friends and acquaintances as the Wanderer on account of his activity as a strenuous cross-country walker.

[3] Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom  (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970),  46.

[4] Harold Bloom, The Internalization of Quest-Romance,  Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (NY: WW Norton, 1970).

[5] In 1842 Benjamin Thorpe, published his translations of three Anglo-Saxon poems that  were preserved in the so-called Exeter Book, among them the poem to which he assigned the title The Wanderer on the basis of his interpretation of its contents.

[6] "Lest from this flying Steed unrein'd, (as once /Bellerophon, though from a lower Clime) / Dismounted, on th' Aleian Field I fall / Erroneous there to wander and forlorne." PL, VII, 18-20.

[7] L.A. Willoughby, The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry (Etudes Germaniques, 3, Autumn 1951).      

[8] Geoffrey H. Hartman, Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness,' Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970).

[9] Harold Bloom, The Internalization of Quest-Romance, first published in: The Yale Review, Vol. LVIII, No. 4 (Summer, 1969). Also in: Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (NY: WW Norton, 1970), The Internalization of Quest-Romance. 3. : The deepest satisfactions of reading Blake or Wordsworth come from the realization of new ranges of tension in the mind, but Blake and Wordsworth both believed, in different ways, that the pleasures of poetry were only forepleasures, in the sense that poems, finally, were scaffoldings for a more imaginative vision, and not ends in themselves.

[10] Angus Nicholls, The Philosophical Concept of the Daemonic in Goethe’s ‘Mächtiges Űberraschen’, Goethe Yearbook 14, ed. Simon J. Richter, Camden House, Rochester NY, 2007. 160.

[11] Mignon und der Harfner stammen aus einer andren Schicht von Goethes Wesen und Leben als alle andren Figuren des Meister. Friedrich Gundolf, Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung," Goethe (Berlin, 1916), 345.

[12] Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, New York / Evanstone, 1969.

[13] At a climactic juncture in the novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers Werther quotes a passage from Ossian in order to overwhelm Lotte with  intense passion and thus make her yield to his unbridled ardor.

[14] Hölderlin composed two versions of