The muse of ancient fame has lost ground to theories based on the notion of the collective unconscious. Let us inspect this process and attempt to determine its potentialities and limits/

1. 1
Is the Coordinating Power of the Unconscious the
Old Muse under a New Name, at Least as Far as
Poetry is Concerned?
Has the Muse, the guiding yet not fully rationally
explicable spirit to which poets in former ages devoted
their verses and from whom they beseeched moment-to-
moment sustenance, left modern poets in the lurch? Not
completely according to M. H, Abrams when asserting that
William Wordsworth, subject to the pervasive influence of
John Milton, converted ‘the Heav’nly Muse’ named in the
opening lines of Paradise Lost into ‘the breeze’ that finds
an analagous place in the opening lines of The Prelude,
1
presumably the very same breeze that wafted forward the
wandering poet who came upon a host of dancing daffodils
or even released the mariner’s becalmed ship in Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Scholars and literary critics sometimes discern patterns
based on recurrent juxtapositions and other contextual
inferences that point to evidence of purposeful design
affecting not only a short poem or other readily
overviewable piece of writung but over an area that could
cover a long epic, several works by the same author and
even further afield. A notable instance of this phenomenon
was noted by Professor L. A. Willought in his article “The
1
M. H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor, The Kenyon Review
Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1957), pp. 113-130.

2. 2
Image of the ‘Wanderer’ and the ‘Hut’ in Goethe’s Poetry.’
2
His chief proposition runs as follows: The frequently
repeated appearances of these combined ‘images’ at
momentous junctures throughout the body of Goethe’s
poetry and works in other genres point to an overriding
influence that can only be attributed to the collective
unconscious posited by Professor C. G. Jung. Can one draw
conclusions that concern the workings of the collective
unconsciousness within the bounds of only one writer’s
body of works? An inquiry into this question follows,
though not immediately, in the later reflections. For the
moment let us turn to an example drawn from English
literature that presupposes no profound knowledge of
linguistic theories but only an acquaintance with common
usage of the English language pertaining to the word
‘wandering,’ the relation of which to the German
’Wanderer’ awaits clarification in ensuing discussions.
CUTTING THE CACKLE
It might be refreshing to study primary texts to fathom what
poets meant by the words they chose.
.
My way is to begin with the beginning;
The regularity of my design
2
L. A. Willoughby, ''The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's
Poetry,'' Etudes Germaniques, July-December, 1951

3. 3
Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the First, VII, 50-52
Words derived from the verb to wander (and wandern in
German) received an honored place in English and German
poetry during the Romantic period. I suggest that one reason
for this development lies in these words being situated at the
cusp of two basic implications, one epic and the other
structural in nature. The word “Wanderer” recalls well-known
motifs and archetypal figures such as Cain, Ulysses and the
pilgrim through life. Through its traditional associations with
the classical muses and poetic inspiration, wandering also
meant a process of organizing subject matter, including that
offered by the archetypal wanderers of old, which came to
symbolize modes of consciousness. As the following
discussion will serve to show, Byron was evidently aware of
the two-sided aspect of wandering as outlined above with the
result that an apparently facetious passage in the first Canto
of Don Juan will prompt a discussion of the structural and
epic ramifications of wandering that emerge from close
readings in Don Juan and Paradise Lost.
Let us consider which of the usual meanings of
"wandering" "fits the context" of the lines from Don Juan cited
above. "Wandering" here is not to be understood in the sense
of physical motion. In terms of the word's immediate
contextual setting it refers to what the speaker ostensibly
intends to avoid, a failure to present certain items of subject
matter in an orderly and strictly chronological manner.
The speaker announces his intention of beginning his
account of Juan's life by informing his readers about Juan's
parentage in a manner consistent with "the regularity of his

4. 4
design." Even so, it is remarkable that he disparages
"wandering" as "the worst of sinning." As though even the
most censorious of preceptors would go so far as to discern in
some badly organized term paper evidence of gross moral
turpitude! It is not out of the ordinary for a person to use
"wandering" as a synonym for immoral behaviour or, in a
different context, as a reference to incoherent or illogical self-
expression. Byron, however, contrasts both these meanings of
"wandering" within the space of the three lines of verse cited
above. In so doing he displays the poet's proclivity to play with
words. Is this merely indulging in a triviality? Let us consider
the word "wandering" within the context of Don Juan. Are
there other passages in this work in which "wandering" is
associated with "sinning" or "beginning"?
A reference to "sinning" suggests some item of epic content.
Sinning implies the existence of sinners and sinners form the
basis of a story. There in are hints pointing to the nature of
the story in question. The connection of beginning with
parentage could pose an allusion to mankind's first parents,
and there is a notable passage in Don Juan which includes
several occurrences of the verb to wander and explicit
allusions to Milton's version of the story of Adam and Eve. The
verb to wander (in declined form) occurs three times in the
passage describing the shore-side walk taken by Juan and
Haidée, the prelude of their sexual and a spiritual union
("Canto the Second" The first line of stanza CLXXXII).
The words "And forth they wandered, her sire being gone"
imply that the young couple took advantage of the temporary
absence of paternal surveillance. The lovers' walk with its
sequel recalls Milton's version of the events that led to Adam
and Eve falling from grace, a connection that becomes explicit
from what we read at the end of the eighty-ninth stanza, for
here it is asserted that first love is "that All / Which Eve has
left her daughters since the Fall." In the ninety-third stanza we

5. 5
find reference to "our first parents." Like them Juan and
Haidée ran the risk of "being damned forever." Consciously or
unconsciously (in my view probably the former), Byron was
influenced by Milton's use of to wander in a passage in
Paradise Lost in which there is an altercation between Adam
and Eve about Eve's yielding to what Adam terms her "desire
of wandering." Eve reminds Adam of this choice of words
referring to her "will / Of wandering, as thou call'st it" (IX.
1145, 1146). Shortly we shall consider another passage
revealing Milton's particular interest in the word to wander.
Byron not only betrays interest in that aspect of Milton's
description of Eve's walk though Paradise that concerns
"sinning," which for Byron inevitably had a strong sexual
connotation. Byron's reference to "sinning" is at one level little
more than a puerile jibe at certain attitudes towards sexual
mores. Byron's description of Haidée and Juan walking along
the shore also captures that sensuous and even voluptuous
element in the Miltonic description of a walk that culminated
in Eve's emotional seduction by the serpent (who approaches
his quarry with a mariner's skill). Both Milton's description of
Eve's walk and Byron's treatment of the scene culminating in
the lovers' union of Haidée and Juan inculcate a sense of unity
expressing a sublimated form of sexual or libidinal energy,
perhaps of a kind that psychologists of the Freudian or
Jungian schools believe to be the mainspring of all human
creativity. Miltonic influence in the respect just indicated also
leaves a trace in the final passage in Shelley's Epipsychidion
describing a walk that leads to a lovers' union. Significantly,
this passage is introduced by the verb to wander.
Let us consider another way in which "wandering" and
"beginning" are related to each other in Don Juan, and indeed
in Byron's other long poem incorporating his travels. An
occurrence of the verb to wander is juxtaposed to a reference
to the Muse in the Dedication to Don Juan and again in the

6. 6
first strophe of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. In the eighth stanza
of the Dedication, the speaker refers to himself as one
"wandering with pedestrian Muse" in contrast to Southey
depicted as one seated on a wingèd steed. In the tenth stanza
the evocation of Milton is not merely hinted at, for the speaker
alludes to a passage in Paradise Lost in which there is a clear
reference to Pegasus and "wandering," arousing the word's
associations with poetic inspiration but also with
disorientation and error.
Up led by thee
Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presumed,
An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air,
Thy temp'ring, with like safety guided down
Return me to my Native Element
Lest from this flying steed unrein'd, (as once
Bellephoron, though from a lower Clime)
Dismounted, on th'Aleian Field I fall
Erroneous, there to wander and forlorn (VII. 12-20)
Again, as in the dispute between Eve and Adam, the word
"wander" is foregrounded, here in a brief exercise in
comparative philology. Milton recalls the original meaning of
"erroneous" in the light of its derivation from errare in Latin (to
stray, to wander). Similarly, Aleian means "land of wandering"
in Greek. In this passage Milton seems to anticipate the crisis
in modern poetry centring on the nature of poetic inspiration
and the identity of the poet.
From a Puritan's point of view it was perhaps somewhat
risqué of Milton to have identified the Holy Spirit as the
Heav'nly Muse in the opening lines of Paradise Lost. In that
context Milton could hardly dwell on the feminine qualities of
the Muse, and only hints at this in his reference to the Spirit
brooding "dove-like" over the "vast Abyss" from which Creation

7. 7
came into being. The dove is of course an established symbol
for the Holy Spirit. Milton was not in any case strictly orthodox
on the question of the Trinity and the personal or non
personal nature of the Holy Spirit.3 The conflation of the
biblical Holy Spirit and the classical Muse springs from Milton'
overall strategy of merging Hebrew and classical traditions,
and the mental orientations they typify, when creating
Paradise Lost.
The expression of fear and of a sense of insecurity that
underlies the image of being thrown off the back of Pegasus
could intimate the beginning of an era of poetic self-doubt that
would later distress Goethe and the Romantic poets when
exposed to the extreme burden of self-consciousness noted by
Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman. 4 Young Goethe, the first
to bear the full brunt of this crisis, produced an image that
uncannily resembles that of the dreaded fall from Pegasus. In
“Wanderers Sturmlied” (1772) the speaker attempts to levitate
his way to the summit of Mount Parnassus, only to stall in
flight and splash down in a stream of mud.
By taking a holistic view of wandering as a phenomenon
that transcends the barrier between the English and German
languages we will notice the following paradox: Goethe and
the Romantic poets identified themselves and their art by the
prominence they gave to the word “wanderer” and acts of
wandering, and yet could lend the word a disparaging note in
references to poets other than themselves. We have already
such a case with reference to Southey as one mounted of a
winged steed combined with an allusion to Milton’s fear of
3
William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex, (Cambridge [Mass.] and London, 1983) 150,
151.
4
Hartman, Geoffrey H., "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-consciousness,"'
Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1970, 46 – 56.

8. 8
falling to the earth and wandering there. In Don Juan
elsewhere the hero is depicted as a youth who “wandered” by
the glassy brooks thinking unutterable things after the
manner of Wordsworth (Canto the First, XC, 90, 91).. William
Blake distinguished between “the Mental Traveller” and “cold-
earth wanderers,” namely the Lakers, Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Southey. In Germany the Romantic poets borrowed the
term “Wanderer” from Goethe but condemned much that
Goethe associated with the term with regard to the role of
poets as active and constructive members of society. Thus
poets cherished their own personal versions of the Wanderer-
Poet symbiosis but dismissed other versions exemplified by the
works of their rivals. Rivals, after all, occupy adjacent
portions of the same river bank they share between them.
How can the resemblances between the associations and
implications of words derived from the verbs to wander and
wandern be explained? Their diffusion throughout German
and English literature is too great and far-flung to be
attributable to conventions and imitations. In one of his
articles Professor L. A. . Willoughby sought to explain the
wide diffusion of what he termed the closely interlocked
images of the “Wanderer” and the “Hut” that are interspersed
throughout Goethe’s literary works as evidence of the
operations of the collective unconscious as postulated by
Professor C. G. Jung. 5Accordingly Willoughby saw the
Wanderer as a symbolic manifestation of the libido ever
seeking unity with its female counterpart, the anima,
represented by the “hut.” the family hearth, the domestic
foundation of society in general. However to reveal the
pattern-generating potential of the collective unconscious one
5
L. A. Willoughby, ''The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's
Poetry,'' Etudes Germaniques, July-December, 1951.

9. 9
must widen the ambit of research to cover works by different
authors. According to Jung the longing of the libido to be at
one with the anima underlies ancient legends that tell of the
exploits of solar heroes and their excursions into the realm of
night, the province of the Moon and female influence that
ambiguously conflates associations with the notions of mother
and bride.
If the human consciousness is indeed responsive to the
passage of the annual cycle, could the seasonal setting of
words derived from the verbs to wander and wandern affect
the tone of the passages in which these words occur? In
Shakespeare’s works the positive aspect of wandering comes
most clearly to the fore in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
conversely, its negative association with wandering “in death’s
vale” in the eighteenth Sonnet is linked to a reference to the
last chills of winter. Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a
cloud” has its setting in spring while in The Borderers,
wandering takes on a Gothic hue attributable to surrounding
images of a storm-blasted heath. For a detailed discussion of
this and related issues, you may refer to a section of this book
publication entitled Wandering through the seasons with
Shakespeare, 30-35.
Byron’s reference to “all wandering“ as “the worst of
sinning” has no immediately obvious bearing on the anything
to do with physical movement though well-known works that
include derivatives of the verbs to wander and wandern
concern walks, journeys and pilgrimages. The core sense of
these verbs is related to such German words as wenden (to
turn) and Wandel (change) and therefore by implication to the
alternation and interrelationship between two orientations,
conditions or even abstractions. This is shown by the fact that
Byron’s “all wandering” combines the oppositions of content
and the forces that inform its organization. The archetypal
wanderers in religious and literary traditions are those who in

10. 10
some sense have turned to or from some measuring line such
as the good path.
Wandering often does refer to physical motion but when this
is so it implies interaction between the inner world of the
mind and the outer world of physical reality, a truth
illustrated by the duality that underlies Wordsworth’s “I
wandered lonely as cloud,” in which daffodils dance both in
the realm of nature and in the poet’s mind. The poem also
corroborates the finding that poetic descriptions of walks and
travels incorporate elements drawn from actual experiences in
the lives of poets throughout the ages. The resounding ending
of Paradise Lost with the image of Adam and Eve departing
Paradise with “wand’ring feet” widens the ambit of
“wandering” from the purely personal domain of one particular
individual’s experience to the collective experience of humanity
through the course of history, and therefore it may be no
insignificant coincidence that William Blake’s cycle Songs of
Experience includes “London,” and “London” begins with the
line “I wander….”
While, for the lack of a muse, we must resort to the
collective unconscious to explain why the associations and
implications of “wandering” in the sense already outlined
transcend barriers of time and language, this same
“wandering” is also subject to the widening of discoveries by
the conscious and analytical mind in response to historical
change. Why did the word “Wanderer” suddenly become so
prominent, first in Goethe’s poetry and then, spontaneously as
it were, in that of the German, and even the English,
Romantic poets? The figure of the Wanderer in Wordsworth’s
The Excursion is a tribute to the impact of William of Norwich’s
translation of Goethe’s dramatic fragment in verse entitled Der
Wanderer, rendered in English as The Wanderer.6 Henry
66
Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, New York / Evanstone, 1969.

11. 11
Wadsworth Longfellow translated the title of Goethe’s
“Wanderers Nachtlied” as “Wanderer’s Night-Songs,”
reinforcing the impression that for poets “Wanderer” is the
same word in German and English.
There is more than one case to show that Goethe’s choice
and placing of the word “Wanderer” found a precise correlation
with the occurrence of the word “traveller” in English
literature. When translating verses in Ossian, James
Macpherson's supposed "translation" of an ancient Gaelic
saga, Goethe rendered “Tomorrow shall the traveller come” by
“Morgen wird der Wanderer kommen,..” words which found
their way into his epochal novel Die Leiden des jungen
Werthers at that crucial juncture when on the 21st of
December Werther read aloud to Lotte a portion of “his”
translation of Ossian in a final attempt to bring her over to his
side, the failure of which attempt would assure his death.
Elsewhere in this book Werther identifies himself a
"Wanderer," here in the sense of a wandering pilgrim by his
words "Ja wohl bin ich nur ein Wanderer, ein Waller auf der
Erde" ("In truth I am only a wanderer, a pilgrim on the earth.")
In Der Wanderer Goethe reworked the central theme broached
by Oliver Goldmith’s The Traveller: tours and excursions
motivated by the quest to explore the architectural and
artistic heritage of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.
In The Music of Humanity Jonathan Wordsworth establishes
that Goethe, a great admirer of Goldsmith’s works, had The
Traveller in mind when composing Der Wanderer or Wandrer
according to the then current spelling. Despite their
communality of theme there are marked differences between
these works. The Traveller, in keeping with much of the tone
of late Augustan poetry, gives vent to expressions of cultural
pessimism concerning the perceived decline of modern
civilization while Der Wanderer captures the wandering
observer’s enraptured sense of being at one both with present

12. 12
nature and the architectural spendour of the past. The semi-
dramatic frame of the work reduced the possibility that it
would be taken to be a personal confession. Returning to the
question as to why William Taylor of Norwich and Longfellow
chose not to translate “Wanderer” in German as “traveller” or
“wayfarer,” I suggest that they recalled the usage of Milton and
Shakespeare with respect to the verb to wander and its
derivatives, for these carried implications and associations
beyond the range of references to physical movement, but
shared with the German verb wandern and its derivatives
intimations grounded in the notions of divine guidance and
the liberty of the poetic imagination.
Literary criticism in general has not shown great interest in
the word “Wanderer” in German and English literature. I
attribute this blindspot in part to the narrow
compartmentalization of thought so prevalent among circles of
literary critics. The one detailed discussion of this matter,
Professor Willoughby’s article “The Image of the ‘Wanderer’
and the ‘Hut’ in Goethe’s Poetry” confines itself to one author,
not venturing into an enquiry of its wider contexts within
which the word “Wanderer” emerges as a focal point in a
Europe-wide interchange of trends and influences. Both
Edward Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1768)
and Goethe’s “Rede zu Shakespeares Tag” (1771) fastened on
the same the essential aspect, deviation from the “beaten
road” of convention, now seen in a highly positive light in
defiance of religious and authoritarian strictures. In a similar
vein Goethe’s Speech depicts Shakespeare as a figure
merging a folkloric giant in seven league boots with the Titan
Prometheus, who in Greek mythology posed both a rebel
against Zeus, the symbol of state authority, and the creator of
mankind. Wandering was the literary arm of liberty, which
throughout the eighteenth century became the rallying cry of
the Middle Class in its contention with the old aristocratic

13. 13
order. In concert with “liberty,” wandering challenged the rigid
literary decorum governing the arts and drama in particular.
Thus the Shakespeare Speech marked the culmination and
breaking point of tensions that had been building up
throughout the eighteenth century.
Goethe played a pivotal role in the literary domain just as
Luther had done in the religious. After wrestling with the
contentious issues of the respective age, Luther and Goethe
underwent an intense personal and mental crisis before
coming up with a solution or resolution that found ready
acceptance in a world impatient for change. The Faust motif,
so central in Goethe’s development as a dramatist from the
height of the Sturm und Drang period until Goethe’ final years,
originated in a Lutheran tract that warned against
overstepping the bounds of intellectual inquiry. Goethe’s Faust
is introverted into the Prodigal Son, who throughout his dark
strivings remains the LORD’s faithful servant, as we are told in
“the Prologue in Heaven.” Named “the Wanderer” in the margin
of the final scene of Faust Part II, Faust is received into
Paradise on the strength of the intercession of Gretchen
transfigured as Mary Magdalene and the Mother of Grace. The
parting reference to the “Eternal Female” validates Goethe’s
claim to being the precursor of Jung, the founder of one
branch of modern psychological theory.
Goethe’s doughty pioneering work in the discovery of the
unconscious throws up a paradox; How can the unconscious
become the subject of inquiry by the conscious mind and
remain the unconscious? How can the subconscious reach
the surface and remain submerged? By way of an analogy,
the discovery of electricity did not involve a complete
understanding of electricity itself but at least a recognition of
its most useful attributes. So it was with wandering, earlier
associated with the operations of divine inspiration and even
in a secular age still able to provide impetus and direction to

14. 14
poetry simply by tapping the power that resides in certain
well-placed words. To wander and wandern are inter alia
verbs of motion and as such can spontaneously generate
allegories if the following words written by with Frederick
Nims are anything to go by.
"A mountain may be a symbol of salvation, a traveller
may be a symbol of a human being in his life. But it the
traveller takes as much as one step toward the mountain,
it seems that the traveller and the mountain become
allegorical figures, because a story has begun." 7
.
The greatest dread that assailed Romantic poets is palpably
evident in the image of a becalmed ship in T. S. Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. What releases the ship from
its moribund state of immobility if not a “breeze”? The
initiation of its motive force coincides with the moment the
Mariner beholds a moving sea-serpent of great beauty by the
light of the moon, - the moon, which according to Jung’s
theory of unconscious epitomizes the object of the libido’s
desire? The movement of the serpent is transferred to the
breeze, which, as in a well-known example of Wordsworth’s
poetry. lends movement to the beautiful and an impulse to
the wanderer’s journey.
The force unleashed by the verb to wander and references
to movement gave life-saving buoyancy to poets who had no
intellectual premise to assure them support along what Keats
described as “the uncertain path” of sustained poetic
utterance, but the same verb offered ways to choose the
7
John Frederick Nims, Western Wind / an Introduction to Poetry (New York, 1983).

15. 15
direction their path, be this towards a goal or through a
labyrinth. Compare John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
with The Holy War, based on the static image of a besieged city
and a much neglected book by the same author, or Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage with Don Juan. The poet’s intent of writing
about a pilgrimage has a directional force towards a final
resolution. Don Juan points to no such goal and moves in a
spiral of every widening gyrations, prompting some to discern
a parallel between the course of Don Juan’s wanderings and
the circuitous structure of Dante’s three zones of the
afterworld.
Do we need to place a judgmental construction on the
winding paths of sinners or saints? This duality may reflect
the bicameral nature of mind, the coherent and progressive
consciousness of daytime experience and the circuitous
operations of the mind in dreams. In Goethe’s novel Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre both kinds of wanderer journey on
together as members of a Wanderbühne, or itinerant theatrical
group. The sustained metaphor that underlies the novel is
biblical again, in this case being derived from the story of the
wandering Israelites on their way to the Promised Land under
the leadership of Moses. The novel poses a secularized variant
of the biblical motif with the wandering group being
comparable to the Israelites in the wilderness and the National
Theatre standing in the place of Solomon’s Temple in
Jerusalem, a symbol of great value to the Freemason Goethe.
Wilhelm Meister the group leader and chief actor with a
predilection for the role of Hamlet, poses the ideal of an artist
with social mission, a wanderer after Goethe’s own heart. In
contrast stand two figures Mignon, a talented but erratic
young female actress and performer in the domain of
commedia del arte and the bearded harper combining features
of a bard and tragic hero. Both die under sad and in the case
of the harper under self-inflicted circumstances. The novel

16. 16
made a great impact on poets who, subject to its prompting,
would form the German Romantic school. While deeply
affected by the Goethe’s wanderer-poetic identification,
Novalis and Joseph von Eichendorff felt personally offended by
what they considered Goethe’s vindictive treatment of Mignon
and the Harper, with whom they empathized as fellow spirits.
In fact Willoughby joined the fray by alleging that Goethe
punished Mignon and the Harper for their irresponsible
“romantic” traits by seeing to their untimely demise. At the
time of composing the Lehrjahre there was no such thing the
Romantic movement. The word “romantisch” where it appears
in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, simply meant in the style of
novelistic fiction. What accounts for this anachronism? As
noted earlier Willoughby set Goethe in isolation from his
historical and chronological background and thus used terms
like “romantic” without due regard given to semantic shifts
affecting words in the course of time, on what the great
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure termed the diachronic axis of
language.
Willoughby’s premise that Goethe punished Mignon and
the harper by curtailing their lives rests on a fallacy.
Throughout Goethe’s writings we find a coupling of two
characters, one a survivor and one a non-survivor. Albert and
Werther, Egmont and William of Orange, Antonio and Tasso,
Faust and Gretchen, not to forget Mignon and Wilhelm
Meister. It is not the survivor who usually engages our greatest
sympathy and interest. The great Jewish scholar Professor
Gundolf, admired even by his Doctorand student Joseph
Goebbels, offered a more satisfying explanation. Mignon and
the harper, no less than Wilhelm Meister, are deeply rooted in
Goethe’s psyche, representing there antithetical yet

17. 17
interdependent elements of the universal mind posited by
Jung.8
The archetypal wanderers that inhabit literature pose
essentially the same antithesis in Romantic poetry. Is the
Mariner a transfiguration of the Wandering Jew, as Geoffrey
Hartman has argued, or the Prodigal Son, as another literary
critic, Bernard Blackstone, has maintained? 9 Why not both,
allowing us to discover how Coleridge, or his imagination,
managed to merge them?
Even that most antithetical of antitheses, the contrast
between “cold earth wanderers” and “mental travelers,” is not
so antithetical as it might seem. The mental traveller, as we
can judge from the poem of that name, is not bounded by the
forward progress of time. He can go into chronologic reverse it
seems. Of course, Blake was not dreaming when he wrote The
Mental Traveller any more than Wordsworth was walking when
he wrote “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” However, timeless
symbols can be approached from more than one direction.
Those depicted as earthbound wanderers come across some
familiar humble object and discover in this a timeless symbol.
The wanderer in the streets of London also encounters sights
that in themselves were not extraordinary in Blake’s London, a
chimneysweeper, a soldier, a girl trapped into prostitution, but
they live in the eternal present, not at some point in past time.
They are condensations of experience by the mind in a
dreamlike state. Pure dreams are the closest expressions of
8
Mignon und der Harfner stammen aus einer andren Schicht von
Goethes Wesen und Leben als alle andren Figuren des Meister." (Mignon
and the Harper spring from a quite different level of Goethe's being and
life than do all the other characters in the Meister novel), Friedrich
Gundolf, "Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung," Goethe (Berlin,
1916) 345.
9
Bernard Blackstone, The Lost Travellers: a Romantic theme with
variations (Norwich, 1962)., 7, 145, 163.

18. 18
the subconscious that we know. Dreams go their own way free
of mental control. We may interpret dreams and even when we
analyse them, we cannot change them by design or subject
them to a priori notions. They lie behind thought. We can only
interpret the given and much the same is true of the
interpretation of poetry. There, as in dreams, we are enthused
or shocked by the unexpected and unforeseen, by whatever
comes round the next corner, as it were.
Hitherto the present discussion has made little reference to
theories of literature but it has still demonstrated certain
theoretical assumptions as manifested by methods of
approach to discussing portions of literary texts, in practical
terms, you might say. The introductory examination of the
lines quoting lines from Don Juan illustrates this point.
To establish the meaning of a word in any text, literary or
not, we consult its “context” to discover which of possibly
several dictionary definitions fits the message of the sentence
in which a word is found. According to this criterion
“wandering” in the lines cited from Byron’s poetry means to
deviate from the subject a hand. However, “wandering” is
equated with “sinning,” a jarring note which is not in accord
with the meaning already established. This prompts the reader
to seek a further context within which “wandering” harmonizes
with some theme or overall pattern.
Can the wider context we are seeking be circumscribed
by the work Don Juan itself? Any adherent of the objective
school of criticism should not find a reason to object to this
suggestion, in principle at least. It is a basic tenet of New
Criticism that the work constitutes an integral unity in which
the order and arrangement of its constituent parts is
inviolable. To change this order in any detail would amount to
an act of sacrilege no less than were the case if one chipped off
part of a Greek sculpture or painted over the nose of the Mona
Lisa. Occurrences of derivatives of the verb to wander are by

19. 19
the same token inextricable from the entire text of Don Juan,
in which each recognizable pattern of words is part of the
work’s aesthetic unity. However, this thought might prove
rather unsettling for those adherents of the objective school
who emphasize the meticulous control of the poet as artisan in
crafting each detail of “the object.” To allow that such
micromanagement covers every detail of a work so long as
Don Juan comes close to admitting that some superhuman
intelligence is in control of the artistic process and not the
artist. In general, critics of this school shy away from
introducing any such mystical element into their philosophy,
which shuts out all extraneous realities from the work, truth
in a religious sense included.
As it happens, a comparison of instances of words derived
from verbs to wander and wandern does provide strong
evidence that the basic binary implication of these verbs
informs much more than one word in a sentence. As we have
observed, the very choice of these words betrays Byron’s
attitude to his fellow poets Southey and Wordsworth and
demonstrates a precise awareness of Milton’s deployment of
references to “wandering.”
What school of linguistics accommodates this
phenomenon? I seek an answer in the postulation of
Ferdinand de Saussure that language incorporates two
aspects langue (language as a system) and parole (language in
the form of specific utterances) and combines two axes, the
synchronic (contemporary) and diachronic, (historic, through
the passage of time) and in elaborations of de Saussure’s
theory of language achieved by members of the Russian
Formalist school of linguistically based literary criticism.
Leon Trotsky, not generally recognized as one greatly
interested in literary affairs, once levelled a criticism again the
Russian Formalists when asserting that they were followers of
Saint John in believing that “in the beginning was the word”

20. 20
and not, as Trotsky and before him Goethe’s Faust, had
countered, the “deed.” 10 On the basis of de Saussure’s
assertion that words partake in both categories, langue and
parole, the Formalist Jurij Tynjanov assigned to “the word”
both a universal and a uniquely specific attribute. His justifies
this case in his article entitles, according to its English
translation, “The Meaning of the Word in Verse.” 11 The word
in Tynjanov’s sense is not just a designator of one or even
several flat meanings definable in a dictionary, for each
occurrence of a word in a text is also colored by its unique
setting within that text. Words have manifold resonances and
associations in and beyond a text, allowing them to coalesce
and cohere at levels that underlie the surface of a text’s
immediately comprehensive message. For a review of
Tynjanov’s and related theories theory see a section from this
book The Emergence of the Poetic Wanderer in the Age of
Goethe from page 11 to page 25.12
10 Leon Trotsky, "The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism," Literature
and Revolution (Russian version published in 1924), tr. Rose Strumsky
(Ann Arbor: 1960).
11 Jurij Tynjanov, , ''The Meaning of the Word in Verse,'' Readings in
Russian, Poetics Formalist and Structuralist Views (ed. Ladislav Mateijka
and Krystina Pomorska). Michigan Slavic Publications: Ann Arbor. 1978.
Original Russian Title: ''Znacenie slova v. stixe '' in Problema
stixotvornogo jazyke. 1924.
12
https://books.google.co.il/books?id=o4JPCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&c
ad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

21. 21
Wandering as Revealed by Shakespeare’s
Works.
“Word, Words, Words”: The Application of a Logocentrically
Based Method to Works by Shakespeare
On the face of it, Hamlet did not have much time for
“words” (see Hamlet, Act II, Sc. 2) to judge from his petulant
reply to the innocent question as to what he was reading. Did
the author of Hamlet share Hamlet’s low estimation of words?
If so, he was in the good company of Ezra Pound, who thought
that a word yielded nothing more than a flat representation of
one or two ideas while images were capable of rendering a
countless multitude of implications. The standpoint I adopt is
quite different, being based on arguments put forward by the
Russian linguist Jurij Tynjanov in an essay which translates
into English as “The Meaning of the Word in Verse.”13 Without
entering the complexities of these arguments I turn readers’
attention to words in Shakespeare’s works – derivatives of the
verb to wander.
1. Widespread Verbal Patterns in Relation to the Interplay
of the Conscious and Unconscious Faculties of the Mind
I begin the series of textual analyses by comparing formally
unrelated passages in which derivatives of the verb to wander
are found. It may prove interesting to investigate how
Shakespeare, whom Goethe named “the greatest wanderer,”
made use of the word “wanderer” (as well as other derivatives
of the verb to wander) himself.
13
Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," translated into English by M. E.
Suino, Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystina Pomorska (Ann
Arbor,1978).

22. 22
As Shakespeare showed us in Julius Caesar, it was indeed
a fateful day for Cinna the poet when, under the prompting of
some strange impulse, he reluctantly left his home and
wandered forth of doors on his way to meet the irate mob that
would lynch him of account of his name, the name he shared
with Cinna the conspirator, the true target of the vengeful
mob. His executors did not take the poet's death to heart as in
their view he deserved death anyway in view of his "bad
verses."
The passage in Julius Caesar mentioned above, which one
can so easily pass over, poses a landmark in literary tradition
as perhaps the first association of the word poet and the verb
to wander to be documented in a literary work. True, that
mischievous sprite named Puck, himself the bodily
manifestation of the powers of imagination, calls himself "that
merry wanderer of the night" but in this there is no explicit
reference to a poet. Even so, another connection, the
association of wandering and the night, is implicit in Puck's
reference to himself. The power and range of this association
come fully to light much later, in the poetry of Goethe and
Novalis and in the theories promulgated by Jung and Freud.
For all his misfortune Cinna enjoyed one consolation. His
last dream is both an omen and the bringer of a promise, for it
conveys the message that he will feast with Caesar. The
petrarchan ideal of true harmony between emperor and poet, a
harmony symbolized by the laurel wreaths bestowed both on
Caesar and on the Poet, must await fulfillment in a timeless
region beyond death. The ideal is reflected in the Renaissance
concept of the partnership of those guiding temporal affairs
and those upholding artistic and spiritual values, which in
more recent times finds a rough equivalent in the concept of
the relevance of literature to the real needs of humanity and
society.
On the basis of the poet-wanderer equation in Julius

23. 23
Caesar Shakespeare was a wanderer himself. The making of
this connection was left to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who
in 1771 referred to Shakespeare as the superlative wanderer
("der grösste Wandrer"). His "Rede zum Shakespears Tag"
("Speech on the occasion of Shakespeare's Anniversary") lauds
the immense scope and wealth of Shakespeare's dramatic
genius.
There follows a case study serving to illustrate the
logocentric approach in action. I believe we shall note from
this the coherence that emerges when we compare
occurrences of the same word throughout the works written by
one author, the very approach Professor Willoughby applied to
the entirety of Goethe's poetry. We will also come across an
indication that the coherence that unites occurrences of the
same word proves able to transcend the barrier between two
languages.
We see an important similarity and an important difference
between the operation of the conscious mind and that of the
unconscious in this: Both organize and generate patterns,
both exercise control. The difference between them lies in the
range of the respective concerting, controlling or organizing
powers. This difference is strikingly apparent in the domain of
language, no matter whether we consider the act of speaking,
writing, reading or listening. In particular I relate this
discussion to the difference between literary and non-literary
language, in short, between workaday prose and poetry. A
good journalist can normally state precisely what he or she
means thanks to an expert control of language subject to the
powers and restraints of the conscious mind. Any word with
several meanings as defined in a dictionary poses no problem
here, as the overall context of an article or report establishes
which particular sense of a word is relevant. What is the case
with poetry? We can say that we have read and inwardly
digested an article, report or book of technical instructions but

24. 24
we cannot claim to have finished reading a poem in the same
way. Of course, there are different schools of opinion on the
scope of reference generated by the act of writing a poem. The
contextualist considers a poem to be a well-crafted artifact like
a sculpture, which, however intricate, remains the product of
the powers of foresight, concentrated effort and deliberation,
that is to say, of faculties of the conscious mind. Such
deliberate control cannot extend too far, not beyond the
defined limits of one poetic work, and this should be short like
a sonnet, for otherwise its length will overtax the memory and
organizing power of the conscious mind. But what about
claims made by critics that coherence and patterns emerge
when we consider a whole range of works written by the same
author, not to mention those which emerge when we compare
the works of different authors? Here critics must posit the
organizing and guiding influence of the unconscious mind,
possibly Jung's collective unconscious. Is this transcendent
influence the old Muse by a name with which we in our
rational age can feel at ease?
To make this discussion more amenable to concrete
illustration, let us examine certain works by William
Shakespeare, namely A Midsummer Night's Dream. We shall
consider occurrences of words derived from the verb to wander
in passages found in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the
Eighteenth Sonnet, The Passionate Pilgrim and Julius Caesar,
where these words, I shall claim, reveal a coherence that belies
the apparent contradictions of their overt meaning. The word
"Wanderer" was later to gain great prominence in the works of
Goethe and the German Romantic poets, finding an echo in
uses of words based on the verb to wander in the poetry of
Wordsworth, William Blake, Shelley and Lord Byron. Those
scholars and critics who have drawn attention to wandering in
the works of Goethe and the English Romantics agree that the
phenomenon is rooted in the operations of the subconscious

25. 25
mind and in the quest of the libido to achieve union with its
feminine counterpart, the anima. This quest underlies the
solar imagery which Jung and Freud discovered in ancient
epics and the figures of classical mythology. For the sake of
comparison and to show that the logocentric approach is not
exclusively concerned with derivatives of the verb to wander
Those who adhere to the objective school of criticism raise
objections to studies that go beyond the limits set by the
distinct form and organization of this or that poetic work. The
contextualist school of critics holds that each element in a
poetic work is so inextricably and uniquely bound up with the
work to which it belongs that it no longer bears comparison to
similar looking elements in other works. I begin therefore by
attempting to justify why an intertextual comparison of poetic
works or passages on the basis of a common word choice may
be deemed valid in the first place.
As M. H. Abrams points out in the introduction of his
monograph The Mirror and the Lamp, 14 a powerful consensus
of critical opinion in the twentieth century has moved to a
position that stresses the objective nature of poetic works. In
this connection he cites opinions put forward by the Chicago
neo-Aristotelian school, whose adherents, such as John Crowe
Ransom, called for recognition of the autonomy of the work
itself. The approach adopted by Ransom, W. K. Wimsatt,
Cleanth Brooks and others encourages a close attention to the
structures and imagery of poetic works and an attempt to
exclude as far as possible any consideration of extrinsic
factors such as those relating to a poet's intentions, personal
situation, etc. We note an extreme case of this approach to
poetry in Calvin S. Brown's essay on Walt Whitman's "When
14
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Romantic Theory and Romantic Tradition
(London / Oxford / New York, 1953).

26. 26
Lilacs last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd." 15
One argument supporting the objective approach to poetic
criticism states that the poet's mind is unknowable and
therefore any assertion based on a claim to know a poet's
mind must prove fallacious. However, one may argue with
equal cogency that "the work" cannot be directly apprehended
by a reader's mind. It must be assimilated and appropriated,
and the consequent processes generate what M. M. Bakhtin
understands as a "dialogue" between the work and the
reader's mind and imagination. In recognition of this fact,
objective criticism demands of a reader's capacity to interpret
texts "objectively." In his article "Objective Interpretation," 16 E.
D. Hirsch Jr. warns of the danger of making subjective
interpretations of a text, admitting that texts inevitably
contain indeterminate and often ambiguous utterances. The
"objective" approach effectively offers what one might see as an
academically correct mode of textual analysis. He concedes
that, when considering a difficult passage, one is entitled to
base certain interpretative judgments on a knowledge of a
poet's typical use of words, at least to the extent that this is
inferable from readings in other works by the author. Here
objective critics must tread warily if they are not to shift their
terms of reference from 'the work' to the author's mind, which
in turn may cause the reader to stray into the quagmire of
intertextual enquiries and consequently forsake a close study
of the work.
The logocentric textual approach is not subject to the
constraints imposed by an isolation of the work from all that
15
Calvin S. Brown, "The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman," Music and
Literature, Athens, 1948).
16
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., "Objective Interpretation," PLMA 75 (1960).

27. 27
surrounds it in the external world, for the word is both a
specific element in the work and yet a part of general
language, and therefore capable of being "colored" by various
contextual planes that extend beyond the narrow confines of
the work itself. Knowledge of the world is after all the basis for
a reader's ability to perceive the internal structures and
associations of the work, and recognition of internal features
enhances a reader's awareness of the work's allusive and
evocative powers. This principle of reciprocal enhancement is
better demonstrated by practice rather than by theory and
abstract discourse. In the following case studies we will
consider the implications of words in the light of their settings
in poetic works and literary tradition, paying attention to
phenomena such as lexical coloration and suppression.
In the immediately following studies of texts revealing
aspects of "intertextuality," the cases to be investigated belong
to one of the three following categories (space allows only a
consideration of the first category in this part of the study):
I hope to show that the unity underlying the various semantic
and context-related implications of the word must reflect
powers of cohesion and harmonization that can hardly be
explained as the product of conscious design, so diffuse and
formally unconnected are the texts under consideration. Like
Professor Willoughby in his study of the "Wanderer" image in
Goethe's works,17 I find a sound foundation for an overall
classification of intertextual phenomena in the supposition
that all utterances that flow from an individual's mind reflect
the coordinating powers of the subconscious strata of that
mind.
In subsequent studies we consider in comparisons
between passages in works by different authors. In such cases
the principle producing coherence must be attributed to
17
Etudes Germaniques, July-December, 1951.

28. 28
powers transcending the bounds of any one individual
author's mind.
2: Wandering through the Seasons with Shakespeare
The following citations, with one exception are from the works
of Shakespeare. In them the word to wander ranges in
meaning and connotation from the negative to the positive for
reasons to be discussed shortly.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
*****
'T may be, again to make me wander thither:
'Wander,' a word for shadows like myself,
(Shakespeare, The Passionate
Pilgrim, XIV)
*****
Cinna. I dreamt to-night that I did feast with Caesar,
And things unluckily charge my fantasy:
I have no will to wander forth of doors,
Yet something leads me forth.
(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.
3.)
*****
Fairy. Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough briar,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,

29. 29
(Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's
Dream, 2. 1.)
*****
[Puck]. I am that merry wanderer of the night
(Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night/s
Dream, 2. 1.)
*****
Der, welcher wandert diese Strasse voll Beschwerden,
wird rein durch Feuer, Wasser, Luft und Erden:
Whoever wanders this path full of woes
becomes pure through fire, water, air and earth
(Die Zauberflöte 5/ "The Magic Flute")
The image of one passing thr water and fire is also found in
the Bible. (Isaiah 6. 43), New American Standard Bible
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
And through the rivers, they will not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be
scorched,
Nor will the flame burn you
How is it possible that the manifold associations of the verb
to wander do not pose contradictions but rather reflect the
essential "lexical unity" of that word? 18 One might suppose
from the first two citations that the word had a predominantly
negative range of meanings for Shakespeare, for it refers to the
lost condition of dead souls or implies that human life is
transitory and futile. The citations from A Midsummer Night's
Dream, on the other hand, show that the verb to wander can
18
Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," Readings in Russian Poetics /
Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska
(Michigan Slavic Publications: Ann Arbor, 1978) 136-14.

30. 30
convey very positive associations.
The implications of the verb to wander in the passage cited
from Julius Caesar pose a highly ambivalent mixture of
positive and negative suggestions, which I now compare in the
light of the word's contextual setting in this drama and of
Tynjanov's theories concerning the effect of words found in
poetry and literary passages.19 We begin with the word
understood at the primary level of significance, that is:
according to its immediately recognizable sense in terms of its
context as it might be ascertained when one reads a text in
standard language.
(1).When "wandering" from his house, Cinna exposes himself
to great physical danger and consequently succumbs to the
fate of death. We have noted the association of "wandering"
and death in Shakespeare's 18th sonnet.
(2) His death results from an absurd confusion of identity
stemming from the fact that he is a namesake of Cinna the
conspirator. Among other negative implications of to wander is
that of becoming disoriented, confused and subject to error.
(3) Through its association with Cain, "wandering" evokes
thoughts about violence and war.
(4) The import of to wander in the dramatic context of the
Third Act of Julius Caesar is not entirely negative. Cinna's
dream conveys a promise that Cinna and Caesar should
"feast" with each other, which implies that they will be united
in death. Death then opens the door to possibilities never
realized on earth. It is the path leading to a spiritual
dimension where ideal relationships thwarted by the
19
Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," 136-146.

31. 31
exigencies of physical limitations, are fulfilled. This pertains,
whether we consider the ideal love of Romeo and Juliet or the
ideal harmony of ruler and poet to which Petrarch and later
artists and poets during the Renaissance aspired. This
harmony is symbolized by the laurel crown, the honour
bestowed on emperors and poets. Cinna's choice of the word
"fantasy" has implications that transcend the sense of the
word that accords with the overt meaning of Cinna's
utterance. "Fantasy" bespeaks the poet's powers of creativity
and his mental freedom. Irony attaches to the sarcastic
utterance that Cinna should die on account of his bad verses.
Cinna poses the only dramatic representation of a poet in
Shakespearean drama of which I am aware. The Romantic
poets, by contrast, were much hampered in their attempts at
drama by their inability to depict much other than a dramatic
self-representation of the Poet. Cinna experiences a dream.
The affinity between dreaming and wandering most clearly
manifested in a play which is defined as a dream by its very
title, a play in which the verb to wander acquires an entirely
felicitous significance.
(5) Consider now the positive associations of the verb to
wander in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In this drama
wandering assumes the most general and inclusive range of
associations and implications, allowing all that is meant by
wandering -- in a lower or partial sense -- to be subsumed and
brought into harmony within the ambit of its highest or
universal sense. In one of the citations from A Midsummer
Night's Dream, Puck refers to himself as "that merry wanderer
of the night." In the other one a spirit speaks of its ability to
"wander everywhere" in sympathy with the elements of fire,
water and air. In the context of the play wandering takes on
the significance of the power of the imagination to overcome all
physical limitations. With this sense in mind, Goethe called

32. 32
Shakespeare the greatest "Wanderer" in his "Speech on
Shakespeare's Day." The association of "Wanderer" and "night"
is a feature in Goethe's poetry as it is in A Midsummer Night's
Dream. A coincidence? I do not believe so, but before entering
into a discussion of this question, let us try to find some
common denominators in the ranges of associations aroused
by the verb to wander.
In the first citations the verb absorbs from its context a
negative sense to do with shadows and the absence of the
sun's presence or some diminution of sunlight. In view of the
contrast between winter and summer informing the 18th
Sonnet and The Passionate Pilgrim, wandering is relegated to
the negative pole in oppositions between light, summer, youth
and life, on the one side, and shadows, winter, old age and
death, on the other. A Midsummer Night's Dream reveals
wandering in its most positive aspect.
The very title of the play hints at the fundamental reason
for this positive range of associations. In terms of ancient
mythology, midsummer marks the sun's fullest possible
incursion into the realm of night. If we agree with Jung that
the sun in ancient mythology symbolizes the libido's quest for
union with its source, midsummer symbolically represents the
greatest intrusion of the sun into the realm of night,
betokening at least a partial attainment of the libido's quest
for union with "the night," the anima. In A Midsummer Night's
Dream the negative aspects of wandering, though hinted at,
undergo a process of sublimation. Where confusions occur,
they are the source of fun and playfulness, as when magic
induces amorous feelings for the most unlikely object of
affection. Even the specter of death becomes ludic in the
tragicomedy enacted by the amateur troupe composed of
Athenian artisans.
The action of Julius Caesar is set just before the vernal
equinox, which in ancient mythology marks the symbolic

33. 33
death of the solar hero preceding his victory over death and
winter. This victory is foretold by Cinna's dream. The unity
underlying the apparently contradictory senses of to wander
springs from what Jung referred to as "the collective
unconscious," allowing us to infer that the scope of this
unifying influence extends beyond what is attributable to
imaginative powers of William Shakespeare, Goethe, or any
other genii, a conclusion drawn by Professor Willoughby, in
principle at least, in his article "The Image of the 'Wanderer'
and the 'Hut' in Goethe's poetry." 20
There is an uncanny resemblance between the use of to
wander in A Midsummer Night's Dream and that of wandern in
the libretto of Mozart's Magic Flute. Schikaneder, who wrote
the score, was a Shakespearean actor and may have been
influenced by his knowledge of the play. There is evidence that
the Queen of Night was originally cast in an essentially
positive role belied by the evil intentions later ascribed to her.
The ambivalence of the figure suggests to my mind that Mozart
and Schikaneder teetered on the edge separating the classical
high evaluation of the sun and the romantic fascination with
the night. 21
20
Etudes Germaniques, July-Dec 1951.
.
21
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, published by Kurt Pahlen (Goldmann
Schott: Munich, 1978; 4th. ed. 1982) 154-158. Kurt Pahlen assesses the evidence for the
theory that Mozart at Schikaneder's instigation reversed the roles of the Queen of the
Night and Sarastro making the former good fairy a power for evil and the former sorcerer
the wise and noble priest of the Sun. Evidently a rival theatre company pipped Die
Zauberflöte to the post by staging an opera that bore striking similarities to Mozart's
opera. The opera in question was entitled Die Zauberzither oder Kaspar der Fagottist
with music by Wenzel Müller, a popular composer of melodies. In Kurt Pahlen's view the
Queen of Night's first aria --composed before the alleged change--conveys profound and
noble sentiments that do not accord with the supposedly evil character of the Queen of
Night.

34. 34
Goethe, the Wanderer
A: Der Wandrer Seen as the Word that Marked the
Culmination of Eighteenth-Century Trends
Professor Willoughby illuminated the immense significance
of the “Wanderer” as a frequently recurrent word throughout
his works, but these works themselves belong to the wider
context of their historical setting. Why did the word “wanderer”
explosively gain such prominence though many of its
implications are grounded in traditions that stem from the
Bible and ancient Greek literature?
1. Wandering and the Quest for Cultural Roots
From earliest times, at least from the composition of the
first epic, Gilgamesh, literature has always recorded, reflected
and interpreted the various migrations, explorations and
significant travels that have taken place through the ages.
This is no less true of the eighteenth century in which
knowledge of global geography and cultural tourism
encouraged by the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Johann Joachim Winckelmann broadened both spatial and
temporal horizons among the educated classes of Europe.
Journeys as they are described in literature are no mere
travelogues or chronicles. Literary descriptions of journeys or
even walks in the countyside find a background in tradition
and recall the journeys and migrations important to the
culture of those writing about travels and journeys, their own
included. Here we can return to Professor Willoughby’s

35. 35
assertions concerning "the Wanderer" and "the Hut" as a
constant throughout Goethe's literary works, and in
particular to the observation that the wanderer-hut
connection has an origin in the history of Israel's wanderings
through the wilderness of Sinai on the way to the Promised
Land.
Goethe was not alone in tapping the imagery and
symbolism of the wandering journey and C. G Jung, whose
theory Willoughby himself adduced in furtherance of his
arguments, posited the universal and pervasive nature of the
libido’s eternal quest for union with the anima as expressed in
the image of the sun and the solar hero as its human
embodiment travelling into the realm of nocturnal darkness,
the domain of the anima, the eternal feminine that conflates
the roles of Mother and Bride, hence entailing the oedipal fear
of committing incest and the need to sublimate this fear in art
and literature. Gilgamesh, the first solar hero known to us in
literature, found counterparts in Ulysses, Aeneas and, down to
more recent times, in the Ancient Mariner and Peer Gynt. All
these heroes enter at some stage during their travels the
nether realm of the dead, in the case of Aeneas to acquire the
wisdom needed to guide him on his journey to Rome and
legitimate its status as the seat of imperial rule. Thus a
psychological paradigm whenever revealed in literature, has
needed, and presumably still needs, the flesh of history and
contemporary actuality to cover the bare bones of a deep-
seated subconscious abstraction.
We have noted that Harold Bloom proposed that the
libidinal quest for the anima was a purely "internal" process
with no connection with religious, social, biographical or
political realities. He seems to ignore the fact that since time
immemorial it has been deeply involved in the search for
cultural origins and for the legitimacy of authority besides any
personal quest for fulfillment. As we can conclude from poems

36. 36
sharing the title of "Der Wanderer" by Goethe and Hölderlin
the quest for origins and personal identity cannot be set apart
from a search for cultural and historic origins. Both kinds of
search were characteristic of the eighteenth century and
terminated in the vision of a new age, this term being used by
William Blake in the introduction to his poem, now hymn,
"Jerusalem."
As this inquiry concerns principles governing history, we
do well to reflect on the phenomenon of historical cycles in the
light of the theory put forward by Giovanni Battista Vico
(1668–1744). 22 Probably influenced by the writings of Hesiod,
he conceived of a threefold sequence beginning with the age of
the gods, the age of heroes and lastly the age of the common
man. The eighteenth century saw the transition from the
second to the third phase, a fact reflected by the middle-class
tragedy promoted by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Heroes no
longer had to be great princes or noblemen but could be
members of the middle class or even lower in social status. In
Goethe’s Faust Part I a humble and devout Gretchen is
Faust’s consort, not Helen of Greece. The flighty queen had to
bide her time until Goethe wrote Faust Part II.
As an age undergoing a transition from one form of
hierarchy to another, the eighteenth century bears a
resemblance to previous ages subject to the forces of radical
change, the dawning of Christianity, the Renaissance and the
Protestant Reformation. Common to all is an ideological focus
on the individual as the source of renewal. When religious
belief ruled the minds of men and women in periods of radical
change in the sixteenth century, leading Protestant
22
Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, revised
translations of the third edition of 1744 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), quoted
in Franklin Le Van Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought, 4th ed., New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1978, 448-451.

37. 37
theologians accorded each individual soul the position of
having a direct relationship with God without the need for the
mediation of the presiding religious establishment. In the
eighteenth century the focus on the individual lost much of its
religious force and drew attention to the privileged yet isolated
status of the artist and poet. Another feature of these ages of
transition has been a trend to downscale the great founding
migrations of the past to the walks and excursions of
individuals. Thirdly, in these ages of transition the use of
metaphor undergoes highly significant shifts of emphasis and
priority. The historical core of some great event becomes
secondary to the allegorical import assigned to it, we might say
the truth that is deemed to underlie such an event. For
example, the description of the wanderings of the Israelites as
a historical event supplies the allegorical basis of a teaching
about the Christian life, but the same religious truths could be
supported by parables with no claim to affirmation on the
basis of recalling historical facts.
In the Reformation the central issue revolved around the
literal or metaphorical interpretation of the body and blood of
Christ. In the process of translating the Bible into German
Martin Luther confronted basic questions concerning the
nature of language and its various aspects: semantics, the
use of metaphors and the scope of its intelligibility. The story
of Dr. Faustus began as a Lutheran tract, and Goethe's Faust
is shown in the celebrated opening scene to be engaged in a
very Lutheran pursuit, the exposition of the New Testament. In
this he ponders how he should best translate the Greek "logos"
into German. Instead of choosing "Wort" ("word") he decides on
"Tat" ("deed"), but here Faust voices an attitude to "the Word"
that arose in Goethe's age, not Luther's. For Luther, words
were vital, creative and challenging, not bookish and dry. It
was in the eighteenth century that philosophers began to
doubt the validity of words as adequate representations of

38. 38
reality and truth, which itself seemed remote and
unattainable. Strangely enough, the Russian Formalists
incurred the censure of Leon Trotsky, who asserted that the
Formalists were the followers of Saint John; thus he echoed
the words of Goethe's Faust and his assertion of that "the
Deed" should replace "the Word." 23 The battle against the
validity of words rages on today in the areas of literary
criticism supported certain philosophical theories such as that
proposed by Jacques Derrida according to which any
statement purporting to state a truth carries the seeds of its
own refutation/
2. Germania, quo vadis?
The states and nations that composed the German-speaking
linguistic and cultural area underwent immense changes in
the course of the eighteenth century at every level, politically,
socially and culturally. If one were to name the most important
shaping events affecting the German-speaking nations, one
would probably mention the rise of Prussia, the Prussian
annexation of Silesia, the union of Britain and the House of
Hannover under a joint monarchy and the French revolution
with its sequel, the French occupation of parts of the
Rhineland. During the war of the Spanish Succession
Prussia was a junior ally of the French against an alliance
between Austria and Britain. In the War of Austrian
Succession these alliances remained intact, but little more
than formally. Now that it was united with Hannover, Britain
had little stomach for a head-on clash with Prussia, any more
that Austria felt great enmity against France, a possible future
23
Leon Trotsky, "The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism," Literature and
Revolution (Russian version published in 1924), tr. Rose Strumsky, Ann Arbor: 1960.

39. 39
ally against Prussia after the seizure of Silesia. In the Seven
Years War the old alliances were now fully reversed with
Britain and Prussia fighting against France and Austria.
For all the vagaries of war and national policy French
cultural influence over Germany remained strong, even
dominant, in Germany as elsewhere in Europe, at least up to
the cultural repercussions that attended the Sturm und Drang
outburst in the 1770s. George I and Walpole conducted their
conversations in French as did Frederick the Great with
Voltaire. French neoclassicism set the standards for the
German theatre under the strict surveillance of Johann
Christoph Gottsched until Lessing somewhat tentatively at
first challenged his neoclassical orthodoxy and instituted a
revolution by instituting the so-called middle class tragedy.
This development marked the process of emancipation of the
middle classes from aristocratic patronage and tutelage,
revealing the increasing influence of English literature,
particularly in the form of the novel, on developments in the
German-speaking world. Samuel Richardson's portrayal of
distressed middle-class girls who ward off the advances of
lascivious aristocrats in Pamela and other novels added spice
to a contentious sociological issue and served as a vital
element in Lessing's plays Miss Sara Sampson and Emilia
Galotti. Goethe's early days as a university student were spent
in Leipzig where Gottsched still enjoyed the status of
the leading authority on literary decorum. The shift from
French classical literary models to English ones reflected a
general desire among German thinkers and writers to achieve
cultural emancipation by shaking off what was felt to be an
overweening foreign influence rather than any unadulterated
admiration of all to be found in English literature.
Friedrich Klopstock and Johann Ephraim Herder felt
aggrieved that the state of German culture had not been on a
par with that of France and England, the result of the setback

40. 40
of the Thirty Years War and its aftermath. Klopstock even set
out to outdo Milton by writing Der Messias and Herder
expected that Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, and the new era
in German drama it promised, would make the dramas of
Shakespeare seem but glorious relics of a bygone age. Poets
belonging to the Göttinger Hain recalled the days of Hermann
the glorious victor over the Roman legions in the Teutoburger
Forest.
Among German authors from Goethe to Wilhelm Müller,
an increasingly acclaimed model for a future Germany lay in
ancient Greece, the cradle of democracy and Western art and
culture. An early manifestation of this interest was the
immense popularity of translations of Homer's epics by
Johann Heinrich Voss, an interest shared by the British as a
result of Alexander Pope's equally illustrious translations. In
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers the protagonist relishes his
readings in the Odyssey until he submits to the allurements of
Ossian, James Macpherson's supposed "translation" of an
ancient Gaelic saga. As Goethe pointed out to his visitor Henry
Crabb Robinson on August the second in 1829, Werther's
abandonment of the Odyssey, with its account of the hero's
return to his family and patrimony, for Ossian, with its
accounts of tragedy and despair, marked the beginning of
Werther's descent towards social alienation and death. Wide
interest in Greek architecture received a powerful impetus
from Johann Joachim Winckelmann's literary works praising
the nobility and grandeur of the remains of Greek architecture
in southern Italy, where he had explored archaeological sites
and documented his findings. In his youth Goethe gained a
profound knowledge of ancient Greek poetry which was so
deeply engrained in his mind that evocations of Pindar,
Theocritus and Anacreon abound in Wandrers Sturmlied,
Goethe's wildest poem written at the height of his Sturm und
Drang years. The idea of a union of the best in German and

41. 41
Greek culture finds expression in Hermann und Dorothea,
which is apparent in the very names of the young couple
forced to travel as refugees during the turmoil caused by the
French Revolution and the wars that followed. The epic
associates recent events with the Muses, whose names supply
the titles of sections of this long poem. When Goethe
composed this work he was still smarting from the jibe that he
was a footloose cosmopolitan more interested in the
allurements of Italy than in the issues facing his native
sphere. As a matter of interest, Hermann und Dorothea
contains one of literature rare references to a female wanderer,
if only by way of a wry comment that a female wanderer is of
questionable repute.
If Goethe had one foot in the world of classical Greece he
had the other very decidedly in the world of the Bible and
Judeo-Christian values. In the light of this it is surprising that
Goethe has been dubbed "the Great Heathen," for the Book of
Job and the history of the Israelites from the exodus from
Egypt to the founding of Solomon's Temple inform Goethe's
greatest works, the Faust tragedies and the Wilhelm Meister
novels. Professor Willoughby, we noted earlier, pointed to the
central significance of the wander-hut imagery throughout
Goethe's writings, and this finds its historic origin in the
Festival of the Tabernacles described in the Pentateuch.
Goethe in his youth attended this festival as a welcome guest
to the Jewish community of his home town Frankfurt am
Main. He tried his hand in Yiddish in one of his juvenilia
compositions and his fragmentary dramatic poem Der Ewige
Jude interprets this figure as a representation of Jesus Christ.
His conviction that poets and artist have a debt to society and
common human needs is to my mind as much a part of
genuine religion, if not more so, as commitment to outward
rituals and lip service to Church doctrines. A book that left a
great impression on Goethe's mind was Gottfried Arnold's

42. 42
Unparteyische Kirchen und Ketzer-Historie, a historical
documentation of the constant tension, and dialogue in a
sense, between orthodox religion and "heretics." 24 Evidently
Arnold's history appealed to Goethe both as a plea for religious
toleration and as an exercise in a dialogic and dialectic method
of ordering thought very much akin to Goethe's own. One
should not forget that Goethe's desire to go beyond cultural
and religious boundaries in addition to his universal curiosity
led him to explore themes related to Islam in his poetic works,
first in "Mahomets Gesang" and in his more mature years in
West-Östlicher Divan inspired by the poetry of Hafiz.
As the Goethe expert Erich Trunz noted, Goethe thought in
dialogical terms. 25
His duzfreunde included William
(Shakespeare). Lida (Frau von Stein) and America. His dialectic
approach saved him from producing a potpourri or salad out of
the multitude of influences that impinged on his
consciousness. In the tradition of Boccaccio and Milton he
blended the two main cultural traditions that compose
western civilization, the Judeo-Christian and the Greek
classical, by identifying in them two modes of consciousness,
those which Erich Auerbach contrasted in the first chapter of
Mimesis, the biblical sense of time as living in the present and
confronting the unknown future with an attitude of faith and
the Greek sense of the fluidity of time of the kind that one
experiences in dreams. 26 Wilhelm Meister and Mignon
24
Gottfried Arnold, Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie. Fritsch, Leipzig und
Frankfurt am Main, 1699.
25
Erich Trunz, Goethe Gedichte, Munich, 1981. 537. With reference to the cycle Verse
an Lida, Trunz notes: “Sie heben sich ab von den Gedichtskreisen um Friederike und um
Lili und von den späteren Christianen-Lyrik durch das Wissende und das Vergeistigte.
Sie sind gestimmt auf das Du, während die Lili-Lyrik monologisch war.“
26
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur,
Bern, 1946.

43. 43
Werther and Albert, Tasso and Antonio and other contrasting
pairs encountered in the pages of Goethe's literary works
personify the duality rooted in Western culture, indeed in the
human mind itself with its rational and its subconscious
component. The word "Wanderer" brings to mind the to and
fro of such a dialogue and is itself the surface manifestation of
a dialogue between poets and generations of poets despite the
barrier between two distinct languages in a progression that
we shall investigate in the following section of this study. To
begin with the influences proceeded from Britain and were
assimilated by Goethe, whose personal resolution of the
contradictions and tensions these influences inculcated was
returned to sender and from then onwards it was Goethe who
did most of the influencing and awakening, and the Romantic
poets in Britain as well as in the German-speaking arena were
on the receiving end of such influence.
3. Influences from Britain and Switzerland with a
Bearing on the Question of Goethe's Promotion of the
Word "the Wanderer" in his Early Writings
With due respect to Harold Bloom and his weighty
contributions to literary criticism, I am in no way apologetic in
averring the validity of "influence" as a reality in the domain of
literature. 27 Doubtless many poets if not all in the first phase
of their writing career are anxious about being overwhelmed
by the influence emanating from those who inspire them in
some way to write their own verses, and some like Robert
Browning go so far as to destroy the evidence of influence that
might be drawn from their juvenilia experimentations. Abiding
influence however confirms affinities that enclose both
influencer and influencee, if you pardon any neologism here.
27
Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry, Oxford: OUP, 1973.

44. 44
The innovative influences that affected Goethe in the period
preceding his encounter with Herder in Strasbourg and
everything which that encounter entailed emanated mainly
from Britain and to a lesser extend from Switzerland, the
home of Johann Jacob Bodmer, the man of letters and
translator of Paradise Lost who challenged the conservatism of
Gottsched on theoretical grounds, but it was another Swiss
poet who set the tone in the matter of representing walks and
excursions into the less accessible zones of nature.
In all periods poets have celebrated the joys of walking in a
natural environment as in the case of Vergil's Eclogues,
Horace's Odes, Seneca's Epistles and the works of
Shakespeare and Milton. However, in the course of the
eighteenth century a notable new interest in walks and
excursions into the natural realm came about. In this regard
Albrecht von Haller's Die Alpen (1729) marks a significant
departure as the first record of a poetic work lauding the
innate grandeur of the Alps or for that matter any high range
of mountains without appealing to some mystical or religious
notion of a mountain as the seat of the gods.. Haller saw the
Alps not as a troublesome obstacle for travellers, as they had
been regarded earlier, but as a shield against the
encroachments of urban civilization, now perceived as a
source of corruption. This poem foreshadowed the appeal that
Swiss landscapes would exert on artists and poets in the latter
half of the eighteenth century, most notably on Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Friedrich Klopstock and Goethe. Excursions in the
wilds were partly spurred by an interest in botany as we know
from Rousseau's Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire and even
Dorothy Wordsworth's diary that provided the basis of “I
wandered lonely as a cloud” for her description included
references to several species of flowers, not just daffodils.
Only three weeks before his death Goethe remarked to
Eckermann that the "English" (in fact Scottish) poet James

45. 45
Thomson had written two poems, one good and the other bad.
28 The “good” poem was The Seasons. What was it about this
poem that earned Goethe's approbation? Its praise of the joys
of agricultural labour? Possibly, for Goethe was always ready
to approve of all such useful and constructive activity. The
true reason lies deeper. Thompson's work was devoted to the
theme of nature for its own sake without any narrative frame
to justify broaching the theme or any other adventitious guise,
and in so doing Thomson broke with a neoclassical tradition.
As the title of his work suggests, Thomson took an all-round
view of nature without idealizing it as though it were an idyllic
park as Alexander Pope was prone to do. One passage in his
work exposes the harsh reality of winter through narrating the
story of a tragic event that came about when a father perishes
in a snowbound wilderness, it being emphasized that he would
never again enjoy the happiness of home life with his wife and
children. Goethe, who read from the works of Thomson in his
youth, also was in no doubt as to the raw and threatening
power of nature, especially in winter, to judge from "Wandrers
Sturmlied," and "Harzreise im Winter."
The "bad work" mentioned earlier was Thomson's Liberty,
a long poem depicting the goddess Liberty as a kind of tourist
through time. She starts out from ancient Greece, the home of
democracy, migrates thence to Rome, where she lingers for
quite some time, before resuming her journey through parts of
northern Europe and so eventually to Britain, where she takes
up permanent residence, the land where, to quote Thomson
again, Britons would never be “slaves.” Goethe probably
disliked the almost ludicrous artificiality of the central image
of the noble goddess traipsing around Europe in the described
manner, but many Americans liked it, not least for the reason
28
1832, Conversations of Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann, translated by John
Oxenford, 1906, Digital production, Harrison Ainsworth-HTTP:
www.NAME2006.

46. 46
that the poem included a compliment to the Americans' sense
of social freedom. The work reflected the new kind of cultural
tourism that increasingly gained favour among the privileged
classes of Europe, it being almost an obligatory part of a
young gentleman's cultural education. In fact Thomson
accompanied such a young gentleman as an escort and guide
on a tour the abiding impression of which left traces in
Liberty..
"Liberty" as a word posed in some sense the political and
social arm of "wandering." in the early eighteenth century. It
incorporated the rhetoric of republican Rome with its emotive
key words of "patriots," "tyrants" and "slaves." Every time that
the word "liberty" was heard by the audience attending
Joseph Addison's Cato, A Tragedy, a play that met even with
Gottsched's approval, Tories and Whigs drowned each other
with shouts of approval. "Liberty" became the slogan
cunningly exploited by John Wilkes in his campaign for civil
liberties in the face of the efforts by George III and the King’s
Friends in Parliament to stifle them.
Wandering need not involve physical movement at all.
Goethe confessed that he learned English by reading the
works of Milton and Edward Young. Young's Night Thoughts
were prompted by a chain of bereavements that Young had
suffered with the death of his wife and other family members.
The author dwelled on the night as a symbol of mankind's
awareness of the transient nature of life in tandem with the
human yearning to be at one with the Eternal and Divine. This
work written in the temper of Christian apologetics (after all
Young became a clergyman) evinced a philosophical depth that
assured its appeal to an entire generation whose members did
not necessarily follow Young's religious persuasion. It abounds
in stark contrasts created by unmediated juxtapositions
without the elegance, the measured reasoning and beguiling
wit of Alexander Pope or Dryden. When the verb to wander

47. 47
occurs (twelve times in all) it almost invariably denotes some
process of thought and the workings of the emotional and
intuitive forces of the mind. The associations of wandering
with the imagination and this with the night predate the Night
Thoughts for it is evident in Shakespearian drama- A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream, in which Puck declares himself to
be "that merry wanderer of the night." Night Thoughts in turn
foreshadows not only Goethe's fascination with the night but
also that of the Romantics as consummately expressed in
Novalis's poems under the title of Hymnen an die Nacht. Young
became the darling of the Sturm und Drang movement but not
only on the strength of Night Thoughts. His essay "Conjectures
on Original Composition" declared: “All eminence, and
distinction, lies out of the beaten road, excursion, and
deviation, are necessary to find it, and the more remote your
path from the highway, the more reputable, like poor Gulliver
(of whom anon) you fall into a ditch, on your way to glory.”
Young's "Conjectures" was a manifesto declaring the
freedom and sovereign autonomy of all creators and
originators in the domain of literature, and as such set a clear
precedent for Goethe's own declaration of independence, "The
Speech on Shakespeare's Day." It was Laurence Sterne who
truly revelled in this newfound authorial freedom, most
obviously in his novel Tristram Shandy and in more subtle
ways in his last literary work A Sentimental Journey through
Italy and France, in which the most trivial incident claims the
attention that would have been deemed unworthy of mention
in any earlier literary work describing a journey. This trend to
zoom in on some detail was transposed from the novel to
poetry in a process Bakhtin called the novelization of poetry.
Any sight could provide the objective correlative for emotions
lying deep in the poet's mind and imagination.
There was a more gentle and enchanting influence that
played on Goethe's mind in the years leading up to the pivotal

48. 48
year 1771. Goethe delighted in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of
Wakefield with its tale of the wanderings of a clergyman and
his family who through no fault of his own fell upon evil days
until the final restitution of his fortunes. It was his long poem
The Traveller which was to exert the stronger pull on the
course of Goethe's early writings, especially those bearing the
word "wanderer" in their titles. Though The Traveller still
belonged formally to the genre of poetic travelogue stemming
from the Renaissance, Goldsmith introduced into his poem
elements that reflected his own point of view and the
enchantingly chaotic side of his personality. Thus, in
Jonathan Wordsworth's informed opinion, The Traveller served
Goethe as a model for Der Wandrer, a poem that will engage
our attention in due course. If we agree that Goldsmith's The
Traveller contributed to the impulse that caused Goethe to
write Der Wandrer, we may ask why William Taylor of Norwich
translated Goethe's poetic dialogue as The Wanderer without
returning to the word traveller. The word wanderer stuck for
reasons already discussed and reasons yet to be discussed.
Now let us consider the immediate background of the literary
volte face that lies at the centre of this discussion, naturally
when the "wanderer" became a central feature of Goethe's
vocabulary and of the Romantic poets also.
B: On the Problem of Two Wanderers in Goethe’s pre-
Weimar Years and How Goethe Met its Challenge
Surprisingly enough, only one noted scholar has published
an article that throws light on the prominence and frequency
of the word Wanderer in the works of Goethe. The scholar in
question is Professor L. A. Willoughby, whose article entitled
"The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry"
was published in Etudes Germaniques back in 1951. He

49. 49
observed that the sheer frequency of the word "Wanderer,"
often in close proximity to the word "Hütte," called for an
explanation and this he found in C. G. Jung's theory of the
collective unconscious. As this recognition of recurring
patterns preceded any explanatory theory, "wandering" should
be treated as a phenomenon.
The Word "Wanderer" made its first appearance in Goethe's
"Rede zum Shakespeare-Tag" in 1771. This speech might as
first seem to be an anti-Aristotelian diatribe pleading for the
emancipation of the modern dramatic art from neoclassical
prescriptions yet the speech amounted to much more. In time
Goethe would revise his former anti-Aristotelian stance as his
drama Iphigenia in Tauris clearly shows. From the point of
view adopted in this essay the really important indication of
the speech resides in the words that Shakespeare is “the
greatest wanderer,” for the inclusion of the word “Wanderer”
pronounced nothing short of the opening of a new phase in the
course of European literary developments. Goethe was not
alone in raising Shakespeare to the status once enjoyed only
by the Muse. Jean Paul Richter accorded Shakespeare a
status second only to that of Jesus Christ. 29
The elevation of the Wanderer in the speech found a sequel
in two poems that were composed in 1772: "Wandrers
Sturmlied" and Der Wandrer. Despite their differences both of
them pointed to Goethe's deep concern with his situation as a
poet in an age caught in the throes of drastic change and
turbulence and both pose contrasting approaches to the world
of classical art and mythology. In "Wandrers Sturmlied" the
Wanderer tells of his attempt to soldier on through storm and
sleet in a forested region of Germany while attempting in his
29
Jean Paul Richter came close to deifying him by granting the Bard a status second
only to that of Jesus Christ as depicted in the "Rede des toten Christus.." an episode in
the novel Siebenkas. This finds a precedent in a passage assigning to Shakespeare the
magnitude of importance later given to Christ.

50. 50
imagination to waft his way to the summit of Mount
Parnassus, the home of the Muses. His attempt fails when he
stalls in midflight only to land in a stream of muddy sludge
through which he must wade towards a wayfarer's shelter. In
Der Wanderer, which is as much a dramatic dialogue in verse
as it is a poem, we do not find the person described as “the
Wanderer” anywhere near Mount Parnassus but in an
elevated location nonetheless, a mountainous region near
Cuma in southern Italy. Here, as a cultural tourist in the
footsteps of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, he explores the
architectural relics left by the ancient Greek civilization in
southern Italy and it is in this rocky domain that he
encounters a young mother with her infant child in her
arms. She leads him to her humble dwelling built with the
stones that once composed a nearby ancient temple. Again we
find a representation the emergence of the "hut" motif in close
combination with appearances of the "wanderer" in Goethe's
poetry and his other works.
There is however a fundamental difference between the
poems and one which determined which poem would be
hidden away for forty years and which should eventually
extend Goethe's reputation and influence to the British
Isles. The reason that Goethe hid "Wandrers Sturmlied" from
public view for so long cannot lie in any deficiency of the
poem, for as the ensuing study of "Wandrers Sturmlied" in
this article will show, it attains a high level of aesthetic
achievement. The true reason for Goethe's embarrassment
occasioned by the poem lay in the sensitive nature of its
contents and the dangers of misrepresentation that its public
airing could entail. The anguish that Goethe suffered in
private was not a purely personal affair. Other poets would
soon partake in similar sufferings occasioned by the same root
cause, a profound sense of isolation and the lack of sympathy
between the poetic spirit and the spirit of an age in which

51. 51
leading lights doubted the very ontological basis of poetry and
poetic expression. We should not ignore the effects of an
individual’s experience of intense self-questioning. Luther’s
soul-searching period when he was an Augustine monk led the
way to the Reformation.
. What explains the divergent tendencies reflected by the
unequal reception of the works under review? To answer this
question we should investigate the dual aspect of the term
"Wanderer" in Goethe's mind. On one hand, Goethe honoured
Shakespeare as the greatest of wanderers in the "Rede zum
Shakespeare-Tag." On the other, he himself was known to
friends and acquaintances as the “Wanderer" in recognition of
his prowess as a seasoned rambler and walker in the
woodlands so graphically described in "Wandrers
Sturmlied." Goethe became uneasily aware that two
wanderers co-existed within his own mind and body.
"Shakespeare" held the place once reserved for the Muse in
the days of ancient Greece and Rome but Goethe was no more
able to resurrect Shakespeare than he was to recall the Muse.
His path forward lay in self-development aided by his
discoveries in the realm of art, language and psychology, but
how was he to know all that in the years between 1771 and
his move to Weimar in 1775? On the practical level at least
Goethe began to work his way towards a resolution of the dual
Wanderer issue by employing his skill as a dramatist.
Der Wandrer is a dramatic dialogue which turns the
principal speaker into a dramatic character whose attitudes
and character provided no conclusive and damning evidence
regarding the author's personal disposition. Thus Der
Wandrer brought Goethe’s release from his fear of self-
exposure and from a debilitating feeling of insecurity arising
from the problem of the two wanderers issue. A touch of
gentle humor supplies an added soothing effect thanks to
the contrast between the young woman with her practical

52. 52
manner of dealing with domestic matters and the raptures of
the wanderer in awe of the beauty of nature and classical art.
Thanks to William Taylor's translation of Der Wander into
English the work exerted a profound effect on Wordsworth's
poetry and prompted the poet to create the figure of the
Wanderer which plays a leading role in The Excursion. The
title that William Taylor of Norwich chose for his translation
was The Wanderer, not The Traveller or another word that
would normally correspond in meaning to the German
Wanderer. Poetry exploits the full range of any word's possible
meanings and associations and in the estimation of William
Taylor of Norwich, as later in that of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, the overall effect of the word Wanderer in both
languages is the same and thus transcends the division
between English and German.
In the following close studies of three poetic works written
by Goethe, "Wandrer Sturmlied" occupies the initial position.
We shall note its complexities, its qualities of humour and the
way it fuses of elements derived from Goethe's deep
knowledge of Greek mythology and his consciousness of his
own environment and times. A study of the Roman
Elegies follows. This sequence is not arbitrary. Lines the
Elegies recall the time when the Wanderer trudged through a
storm-swept forest in a clear allusion to the scene depicted in
"Wandrers Sturmlied.," but in Rome the tables have turned.
The artist’s place is not the summit of Olympus but the
wanderer’s hut transformed into a workshop in Rome where
the city’s rich artistic heritage attests that the powers of
divinity themselves have descended to the earthly plane..
Thirdly Der Wandrer will be discussed with a special interest
in its pivotal role in the interchange of cultural and literary
influences effecting Britain and the German-speaking area.
The following essays date from various times. In fact the
paper devoted to “Wandrers Sturmlied” started life as a term

53. 53
paper I wrote under the supervision of the noted scholar, poet
and translator Dr. Christopher Middleton when I was affiliated
to the Program of Comparative Literature at the University of
Texas at Austin.
C: From the Heights of Parnassus to the Artist's Humble
Workshop
The members of the literary circle that met at Herder's
home in Darmstadt recognized in any mention of the word
Wanderer a reference to Goethe himself, for he had earned the
reputation of a hardened wanderer on account of his habitual
long walks between his native Frankfurt and Darmstadt
through wind and weather. Both he and "Shakespeare" were
wanderers, and how then could the gulf betwixt these
wanderers be crossed? Was any poem treating the nature of
wandering a personal statement that could expose the poet to
censure or ridicule? Such a fear most probably induced
Goethe to withhold the publication of "Wandrers Sturmlied" for
as many as forty years. This poem, composed in 1772,
presents the residue of Goethe's hard experience of trudging
through woodland on his treks between Frankfurt and
Darmstadt. The journey described in this poem unites the
dimension of physical movement on the earthbound plane and
the dimension of an imaginary landscape drawn from Greek
mythology. On the imaginary plane the wanderer attempts to
fly his way to the summit of mount Parnassus with an escort
of Graces and Charities. The poem evinces a threefold
structure and mode of development in concert with references
to the three ancient poets Pindar, Anacreon and Theocritus
and their governing deities, Dionysus, Zeus and Apollo. As in
the Shakespeare Speech the sphere of classical mythology and
that of contemporary awareness cohabit the same text,
producing comical effects in "Wandrers Sturmlied." Mud is