Second edition, with a new preface

‘… opens to view the swirling currents of thought and feeling in whose midst Heine stood: his Byronism, his affinities with Sterne, Don Quixote, Goethe, with German idealism, Saint-Simonianism, left Hegelianism, Young Germany, and Marx. This is a study of the first importance for the Heine scholar and the specialist in
19th-century thought’ Choice (USA)

This study focuses on the ambivalence Heine expressed throughout his life between the ideal of self-sufficient art, of which he saw Goethe as the exemplary exponent, and the new ideal of committed poetry, which he developed under the influence of Saint-Simonianism and his friendship with the young Karl Marx (who was also in turn, as the author shows, influenced by Heine).

Heine was the first great poet of modern, self-conscious ‘inner discord’, a concept first expressed early in the nineteenth century by the German critic August Wilhelm Schlegel whose lectures he attended. It was this inner discord, between what was seen as the harmony of Greek culture and civilization and the spirit of the modem age, that accompanied and dominated Heine for the rest of his life. His attempt, in his lyric poetry and in his critical prose, to heal or compensate for this discord, whether by politics or art, or through the resignation of irony or the hope of love, is the subject of this book.

Published by Libris in 1994