Six Sapphic Odes 1753-1934. A Study in Literary Reception

This is a brief historical survey of the ode genre in German, using the Sapphic ode as an example of how German poets adapted classical stanza forms for the needs of their own language. Poems by Klopstock, Platen, R.A. Schroder, and Weinheber provide illustrations, together with short interpretations. What begins initially as a major renewing force in German lyric poetry (Klopstock), gradually becomes an exercise in metrical correctness (Platen), proceeding into the twentieth century as a conservative survival with controversial associations (Schroder, Weinheber). The original impulse through Klopstock and his followers does not regard classical form as an absolute, but is basically concerned with liberating poetic diction. Hence deviations from the stanza forms of classical poetry are permissible. After about 1800 the use of classical ode forms implies the desire on the part of poets to preserve rather than to experiment, so that the position of the ode, as a deliberately imitative, rhetorical, and sometimes `epigone,' form, often leads it to be linked with retrogressive tendencies in literature

Art · Literature · Ode · German Literature and Culture Studies