GERMAN POETRY

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Upper-Level

"If the soul speaks out, alas! it is no longer the soul that speaks" - in Schiller's famous line one of the many fascinating paradoxes of lyric poetry is expressed. With the tradition of the "Lied," poems set to music, German poetry of the Classical-Romantic epoch was soon to become the epitome of lyric poetry as such. There were, however, poems of quite different kinds before and after Goethe, Eichendorff, and Heine. Without neglecting the Classical-Romantic period, the course will explore the history of lyric expression in German literature from the early modern period to the present in both poems and theoretical texts. Taught in German.