GOETHE’S VIEWS ON POETRY AND POLITICS
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on
28th August 1749 and passed
away in Weimar, Germany, on 22 March 1832. He was a versatile writer and
his authorship extended to poetry, plays, novels, art, science, religion,
philosophy and statesmanship. He is best
known for his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and the play Faust. He
occupies a prominent place in world literature.
His interest in India was quite vast and admirable. Urdu and Persian
poet Dr .Sir Mohammad Iqbal considered
him and India’s greatest Urdu
poet Mirza Asad Ullah Khan Ghalib as kindred souls. Interestingly enough,
Goethe called his bunch of poems as ‘Divan’ a Persian word, which instantly
reminds Indian readers of Mirza Ghalib’s Urdu poetry entitled as
‘Divan-e-Ghalib’.
What follows are Goethe’s views about the unpalatable role of
a poet in politics. In a short statement
on Poetry and Truth, he says “The word liberty has such a splendid
sound, we could not do without it, even if it named an error.” It is a
remarkable statement because poetry is enjoyed not only for its thoughts and
feelings but also for the enchanting sound of its words.
The views that are reproduced
below are found in To Eckermann (1832). They express Goethe’s outlook about a poet’s
unadmirable interest in politics.
“If a poet would influence politics, he must join a party,
and then he is lost as a poet: goo-bye to his free spirit and his open mind! He
must pull over his eye the cap of bigotry and hatred.
The poet as a man and a citizen will love his native land,
but the native land of his genius lies in the world of goodness, greatness and
beauty, a country without frontiers and boundaries, ready for him to seize and
shape wherever he finds it. His gaze is like the eagle’s poised far above the
lands, pouncing on the hare whether it cowers in Saxony or in Prussia.
Then, what does it really mean “to love one’s country, to be
a patriot”? What better could a poet do all his life than try to combat
pernicious prejudice, open the narrow heart, and enlighten the spirit of his
people, purifying their taste and ennobling their thought? What work for him
could be more patriotic? To set him those unfitting and thankless tasks would
be as bad as expecting the colonel of a regiment to entangle himself in
politics and neglect his own profession.” (Courtesy: The Wisdom of Goethe
by Emil Ludwig).
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16th
December 2020 G.
R. Kanwal
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