Profiles in Poetry: Friedrich Schiller
By David Gosselin
“Trust me, the fountain of youth, it is no fable. It is running
Truly and always. You ask, where? In poetical art.”
—Friedrich Schiller - The Fountain of Youth
Friedrich Schiller was born on November 10th, 1759 in Marbach, Württemberg. He was without question one of the greatest poets and dramatists to have ever lived. While Schiller is not very well known in the English speaking world today, his influence in the realm of ideas can be seen across history.
Weimar classicism, generally considered the high point of German culture, was in great part a product of Schiller’s genius. Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms all held their cups to the divine springs of Schiller's imagination. Some of the greatest musical settings have been based on Schiller's poems, or on those of poets inspired by Schiller. After all, while perhaps little known today, Schiller’s ‘‘Ode to Joy’’ supplied the lyrics for Beethoven’s 9th symphony:
Joy, thou beauteous godly lightning,
Daughter of Elysium,
Fire drunken we are ent’ring
Heavenly, thy holy home!
Thy enchantments bind together,
What did custom stern divide,
Every man becomes a brother,
Where thy gentle wings abide.Chorus
Be embrac’d, ye millions yonder!
Take this kiss throughout the world!
Brothers—o’er the stars unfurl’d
Must reside a loving Father.
Beethoven’s hero and model for the sublime artist was none other than the character of Joan of Arc, found in Schiller's play The Maid of Orleans.
Since part of the barrier to Schiller’s ideas in our modern world has been the lack of authentic translations, The Chained Muse is proud to present a series of original translations. The purpose of producing such translations is not simply that of translating Schiller's poems from German to English, but of presenting his works as new authentic English poems, whereby we might catch a glimpse of the poet’s original voice.
We have selected ten great examples of Schiller’s poetry—each of which presents a different facet of his genius as both poet and universal thinker. In this context, with the publication of these poems, we would add the following prefatory remarks in order to give the reader some potential insights into the nature of Schiller’s mind and his compositional method as he developed it in numerous literary essays and correspondences.
The Sublime
Schiller’s works are populated by the conception of the Sublime. In one of his late essays, “On the Sublime,” he elaborates his ideas in the following manner:
The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is a combination of woefulness, which expresses itself in its highest degree as a shudder, and of joyfulness, which can rise up to enrapture, and, although it is not properly pleasure, is yet widely preferred to every pleasure by fine souls. This union of two contradictory sentiments in a single feeling proves our moral independence in an irrefutable manner. For as it is absolutely impossible that the same object stand in two opposite relations to us, so does it follow therefrom, that we ourselves stand in two different relations to the object, so that consequently two opposite natures must be united in us, which are interested in the conception of the same in completely opposite ways. We therefore experience through the feeling of the sublime, that the state of our mind does not necessarily conform to the state of the senses, that the laws of nature are not necessarily also those of ours, and that we have in us an independent principle, which is independent of all sensuous emotions.
Schiller viewed art as the sacred fount, a holy ground, in which man’s true nature could be captured. Despite the vicissitudes of time and worldly folly, man's higher nature was unchanging, and could be rediscovered in beautiful art, at any time, regardless of the tastes of the day and caprice of the times. Schiller never bent under the yoke of "contemporary" thinking, instead he revolutionized it by building on the work of the immortal poets who came before him, especially the Greeks.
In his ninth of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man Schiller wrote the following:
The Artist, it is true, is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favorite! Let some beneficent Divinity snatch him when a suckling from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence; but terrible, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present; but their Form he will derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his nature. Here from the pure aether of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and generations, which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it.
Schiller very consciously crafted his poetry with the humanity's sublime nature in mind. He believed that human beings were creatures of both sense and reason, but that neither were in intrinsic opposition, and that a self-conscious individual could become independent of all the external forces of the world, both natural and arbitrary, in order that he might act as an independent force, were the need to ever be presented.
Thus, further in his essay "On the Sublime" he states:
Does one now remember, what value it must have for a being of reason, to become conscious of his independence of natural laws, so one comprehends how it occurs that men of sublime bent of mind can hold out for compensation, through this idea offered to them of freedom, for every disappointment of cognition? Freedom, with all of its moral contradictions and physical evils, is for noble souls an infinitely more interesting spectacle than prosperity and order without freedom, where the sheep patiently follow the shepherd and the self-commanding will is degraded to the subservient part of a clockwork.
Schiller’s Late Poetry
