A greatest-hits selection from some of the most popular poets of the Romantic movement, including Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and Heine, in a gorgeously jacketed small hardcover Unlike the more earnest English Romantic poets, followers of the Romantic movement in Germany valued wit and humor along with beauty. Admiration for nature is also prominent in their poetry, and in particular the dramatic forests which still cover large areas of Germany. Love and death crop up repeatedly as themes in such famous works as Goethe’s “Elf King” and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde . Characters from myth and folklore abound—most famously Lorelei, an enchantress who is associated with the rock of the same name on the bank of the Rhine, who is featured in several poems in this volume. Also gathered here are such favorites as Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine,” Schiller’s “The Visit of the Gods,” Eichendorff’s “Nocturne,” and Heine’s “The Magic Month of May,” along with works by the most famous women writers of the Romantic era, including Karoline von Günderrode and Sophie Mereau. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. CHARLOTTE LEE is an associate professor of German literature at the University of Cambridge in the UK. FOREWORD The convention in scholarship is to see German Romanticism as starting in the 1790s, with the Schlegel brothers and their circle in Jena, and ending in the 1820s, part way through the career of the great poet Heinrich Heine. This anthology begins earlier and fi nishes later, thereby incorporating crucial influences – without which Romanticism cannot be properly understood – and giving an idea of the legacy of the movement. This is particularly helpful if we wish to develop a sense of the place of German poetry in the broader context of European Romanticism. Indeed, it is perhaps more accurate, though less elegant, to speak of Romanticisms. These flowered at different times. French literary Romanticism, for example, reached its high point a little later than German literary Romanticism. Romantic movements in the various artistic media also had their own trajectories: in Germany, the Romantic era in music peaked later than in literature, and extended as late as Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler. A more generous understanding of the boundaries of German literary Romanticism, therefore, also helps us to understand how developments in poetry relate to those in other art forms. This collection opens with an excerpt from William and Helen, Sir Walter Scott’s translation of Lenore, a ballad by Gottfried August Bürger. Lenore was very influential in Britain and elsewhere, and it was also in some ways the source of the trend for ballads which the Romantics adopted, via Goethe. The Early Romantic circle from Jena is represented in the poetry of August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck and Sophie Mereau. The Schlegel brothers provided much of the theoretical impetus behind Early Romanticism, and August Wilhelm’s erudite contributions were particularly important for developments in the lyric. Also of that generation, and kindred to an extent in philosophical terms, was Friedrich Hölderlin, one of the most complex but most brilliant writers in the German language. Next come Clemens Brentano and Karoline von Günderrode. Günderrode was a rare philosophical and poetic talent, whose work is rooted in its time, yet also highly distinctive. Brentano was an especially gifted lyric poet, who was prolific on his own terms, and who also collaborated with Achim von Arnim to produce the famous folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (extracts of which were later set to music by Gustav Mahler). The predilection for folk­style poetry – which was often highly artful – goes back several decades to the infl uence of Johann Gottfried Herder, and before him, Thomas Percy in England. Goethe’s ‘Heidenröslein’ is a particularly famous example of this approach. Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff represents the peak of later Romantic poetry. He had become closely acquainted with Arnim and Brentano in Heidelberg, and ultimately took Romanticism in a very different direction from that envisioned by the Schlegel brothers. Several other poets of roughly Eichendorff’s generation, such as Adalbert von Chamisso, Justinus Kerner and Ludwig Uhland are also included: they were all popular in Germany and, very often, were beloved of Victorian translators too. Together with Eichendorff, Heinrich Heine is often considered the Romantic poet par excellence. From early in his career, however, his work is poised between admiration for and scepticism of the movement, and his critical distance becomes more marked later on. Although this selection is tipped towards the earlier part of his œuvre, the later, in some ways an