INTRODUCTION

The West-Eastern Divan is in many ways a revolutionary book. Goethe himself was no revolutionary – far from it – and yet his book had the effect of capsizing conventional nineteenth-century conceptions of poetry. It represented nothing less than a decisive reconfiguration of German, and indeed European, poetry. Goethe achieved this in the most unexpected way: by his openness to a foreign and exotic world that was unknown to his readers, he widened the scope of German poetry and he did so in formal measures that were thoroughly familiar, thoroughly German and yet, startlingly new, even bizarre, in their content. He taught his readers to decipher ‘that hidden grammar that declines both the poppy and the rose’ (‘Higher and Highest’, Poem 188).1 He introduced a new lexicon of tropes and figures drawn from Persian poetry, as well as a novel form of allusiveness. He wrote, ‘The word is a fan! Between its pleats a pair of lovely eyes gazes out’ (‘Hint’, Poem 26) and the poems themselves are ‘pleated’: Persian or Arabic sources, ingeniously adapted from prose or verse excerpts in translation, are shaped into fresh and original forms (‘The Winter and Timur’, Poem 102).2 When Goethe writes, ‘The rose always appears impossible, inconceivable the nightingale’ (Poem 109), he is folding a line from Rūmī into German and the effect is at once mysterious and familiar; it is an insight that opens ever outward and yet, it is one we seem always to have had. The genial tone of the book only enhances its strangeness.

Readers new to the Divan might expect to find further evidence of the ‘Olympian’ Goethe, that lofty and rather stuffy caricature. After all, he was almost seventy when he embarked on the Divan. And yet, though the poems are those of an ageing man, they read as if written by a young man. Even the stateliest poems in the Divan display an ardour and passion that are hardly consistent with the image of ‘Goethe the Sage’, the very effigy of wisdom mounted on a pompous pedestal. We know, of course, that this is a false image; Goethe once confessed that he had not passed a day of his life without experiencing severe inner conflict. What serenity he possessed came at the cost of continual effort. This is not immediately apparent in the Divan for it is a book of uncommon radiance; and yet, when we consider the contradictions and antitheses on which it is based and from which it arose, we may glimpse something of the spiritual and artistic struggle it demanded. Then, too, for all their formal beauty the poems of the Divan are often impetuous and sometimes even a bit silly; they present the unlikely spectacle of an old man besotted with a younger woman – and a younger married woman at that. This is the stuff of comedy; and in certain poems, there are hints that Goethe was aware of the absurdity of his situation, if only in the eyes of envious others. That he succeeded in transforming this potentially comical affair (for the husband was not simply complacent but flattered to be cuckolded by the great Goethe!) into sublime verse testifies not only to the shaping force of his imagination but to something even rarer: the capacity to surrender with complete confidence to his own deepest feelings and to follow wherever they might lead him.