Opportunity seal
The expression casual poetry ( casual poetry as well as parallel word formations on -lyric ) denotes poetry in literary studies that is usually written from a commercial point of view for a special occasion ( casual writing ). In Poetry and Truth and in conversations with Eckermann, Goethe also uses the expression "occasional poem" in a less derogatory sense for poems that owe themselves to the inspiration of a moment that is now captured in the poem.
history
The area goes back to ancient tradition, which already offered praise to the rulers , poems about battles and works on political occasions. The limits to poetry under patronage are unclear . Skalds wrote for their followers , medieval poets wrote for the farms they maintained and offered political propaganda in return.
Occasional poetry became a commercial bourgeois business with the advent of printing . The tradition here goes back to the Latin poetry of the humanists . From the 16th to the 18th century, in most of the larger cities in Germany, poems, " Carmina " the unspecific term of the time, could be written on any occasion . The most important occasions were weddings, christenings, funerals , doctoral theses, city or court celebrations.
The goods produced for the occasion mostly only paid tribute to the sung about or the occasions of an individual and personal nature in secondary aspects. Standards and clichés dominated the occasional poetry. Ordered works had to be ready for printing within a few hours and have a uniform quality standard in order to help customers obtain a prestige object that met all standards - they were therefore (according to the criticism in the later 18th century) not suitable for the poets' self-portrayal. The business was profitable. Benjamin Wedel , Christian Friedrich Hunolds publisher, noted in 1731 that Hunold regularly paid a ducat (2 2/3 Reichstaler ) for commissioned works (for comparison: the excellently paid novelist received two Reichstaler for a printed sheet of eight pages). Depending on the price range, the work was printed either in a cheaper, smaller quart or in the more expensive folio format. At the end, print runs of 50 or 100 copies were distributed among the guests as a souvenir. Simon Dach's notes provide a deeper insight into business practices and production conditions. The diaries of the Nuremberg poet Sigmund von Birken are even more informative and important as a source .
The quality of the production was higher than the purely commissioned work, which poets published on major political events (accession to the throne, jubilees to the throne, victories in battles) without being asked, but mostly in anticipation of a monetary gift or lucrative patronage.
The production of casual poetry found itself heavily criticized at the end of the 17th century. Hunold called the goods "Lumpenzeug" - and, in order not to endanger his own reputation, sold them in Hamburg through straw men. Johann Christoph Gottsched criticized the practice of casual poetry in more detail. It contributed nothing to the area of poetry that was just becoming literature . Goethe's rehabilitation of the genre was already characterized by nostalgia at the turn of the 19th century. Here a genre had been lost that was not yet committed to the rules of high art: “The occasional poem, the first and most extreme of all types of poetry, became contemptuous to such an extent that the nation cannot yet come to a concept of its high value . ”( From my life 10). Incidentally, Goethe testifies to a completely different use of the term: “All of my poems are occasional poems, they are stimulated by reality and have a foundation in them. I don't believe in poems drawn out of thin air. "(Eckermann 1, 38)
Occasional poetry was first cultivated in Latin, later also in German. In the 1630s, casual poems came up in dialects. For Low German, this marks the transition from standardized Middle Low German to a spelling based on local pronunciation, which is why the occasional poetry is of high source value for historical dialect research.
The end of the genre came in bourgeois life at the turn of the 19th century. The occasional poem became a private matter and lives on today at private parties as a mostly humorous poem, which a person gifted for this purpose usually recites in the form of a speech in verse. There is no end to production in sight on the political stage, but the word is no longer used for political propaganda in poetry.
literature
- Ernst M. Oppenheimer: Goethe's poetry for occasions . Toronto 1974.
- Wulf Segebrecht : The occasional poem, a contribution to the history and poetics of German poetry. Metzler, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-476-00346-9 .
- Reinhard Breymayer: An unknown poem by Friedrich Hölderlin [attribution] in a collection of Württemberg family poems . In: Blätter für Wuerttemberg Church History 78 (1978). Stuttgart [1979], pp. 73-145 [on the collection of occasional poems in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart ], ISSN 0341-9479 .
- Wolfgang Adam: Poetic and Critical Forests Investigations into history and forms of writing “on occasion”. Supplements to the Euphorion 22. Winter, Heidelberg 1988, ISBN 3-533-04036-4 .
- Rudolf Drux: Occasional Poem . In: Gert Ueding (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of rhetoric . Vol. 3: Eup-Hör . Tübingen 1996, Col. 653-667.
- Wilhelm Hilgendorff: Occasional Speech, ibid., Sp. 667–668.
- Roland Berbig: The Opportunities in the Occasional Poem of the 19th Century . In: Berliner Hefte zur Geschichte des literar Lebens 4 (2001), pp. 7–23, ISSN 0949-5371 .
- Peter Wruck: Occasional poetry and sociability in the literary association. Observations based on song books by the Berlin Wednesday Society and the "Tunnel over the Spree". In the appendix Moritz Gottlieb Saphir: “The occasional poet” , ibid., Pp. 36–59.
- Stefanie Stockhorst : Prince Prize and Art Program. Studies of social and genre history on Goethe's occasional poems for the Weimar court. Studies on German Literature 167. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-484-18167-2 .
- Kristi Viiding: The poetry of neo-Latin propemptics at the Academia Gustaviana (Dorpatensis) in the years 1632–1656. Dissertationes studiorum graecorum et latinorum universitatis tartuensis 1. Tartu University Press, Dorpat 2002.
- Ingrid Maier u. Jürgen Beyer: Two Russian occasional poems from Dorpat (1642) and their Swedish author Johan Roslin. In: Scando-Slavica. Annual international publication for Slavic and Baltic philology, literature, history and archeology 54, 2008, pp. 102-134.
- Jürgen Beyer: The beginning of Dorpater casual poetry in popular languages. With an edition of three Low German occasional poems by Adrian Verginius from 1638. In: Christoph Schmelz / Jana Zimdars (ed.), Innovations in the Swedish Empire. A presentation based on case studies. Series of publications by the David Mevius Society 3. Dr. Kovač, Hamburg 2009, pp. 181–207.
- Joachim Küpper, Patricia Oster, Christian Rivoletti (eds.): Opportunity makes poets. L'Occasione fa il poeta. Building blocks for a theory of the casual poem . Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6923-1 .
See also
Web links
- Text example of a typical funeral Carmens: The plaintive Kautebach at the grave of the blessedly deceased Mr. Adolph Böckings (Frankfurt a. M .: JL Eichenbergs Wittwe, 1770).