NOVALIS
Friedrich von Hardenberg

Born: Oberwiederstedt, Prussian Saxony (now in Germany); May 2, 1772

Died: Weissenfels, Saxony (now in Germany); March 25, 1801

PRINCIPAL POETRY

Hymnen an die Nacht, 1800 (Hymns to the Night, 1897, 1948)

Geistliche Lieder, 1802 (Devotional Songs, 1910)

OTHER LITERARY FORMS

The poetry alone does not even hint at the full scope of the literary activity of Novalis (noh-VOL-uhs) or his encyclopedic interest in philosophy, science, politics, religion, and aesthetics. While two seminal collections of aphorisms—Blütenstaub (pollen) and Glauben und Liebe (faith and love)—were published in 1798, the bulk of his work was published posthumously. Among these writings are six neglected dialogues and a monologue from 1798-1799; the essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe, 1844), written in 1799 but first published fully in 1826; and two fragmentary novels, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1802; The Disciples at Sais, 1903) and Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802; Henry of Ofterdingen, 1842), begun in 1798 and 1799 respectively. As prototypes of the German Romantic novel, these two works comprise a variety of literary forms: didactic dialogues, poems, and literary fairy tales. Like so much of Novalis’s work, these novels were first published by Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich von Schlegel in the 1802 edition of Novalis’s writings. Insights into these literary works and into Novalis’s poetics are provided by his theoretical notebooks and other papers, which include his philosophical and scientific studies and outlines and drafts of literary projects, as well as his letters, diaries, and professional scientific reports.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Novalis is perhaps best known as the creator of the “blue flower,” the often trivialized symbol of Romantic longing, but his importance has a far more substantial basis than this. Within the German tradition, his Romanticism influenced important writers such as Joseph von Eichendorff, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hermann Hesse. As an innovative theorist and practitioner of the Romantic novel, Novalis prepared the way not only for the narrative strategies of Franz Kafka’s prose but also for the themes and structures of Thomas Mann’s major novels. As the poet of Hymns to the Night and as a theorist of poetic language, Novalis set the Orphic tone for German Romantic poetry and the aesthetic agenda for German Symbolists such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George.

Novalis’s impact outside Germany is no less consequential. His evocative imagery, the prose poems included in Hymns to the Night, and his view of poetic language as musical and autonomous make him a major precursor of the French Symbolist poets. Among them, Maurice Maeterlinck was especially drawn to Novalis’s philosophy of nature, and he translated The Disciples at Sais in 1895. Later, Novalis’s imaginative poetics not only inspired André Breton, one of the founders of French Surrealism, but also had an impact, less widely known, on Chilean Surrealism via the poets Rosamel del Valle and Humberto Díaz Casanueva. In the English-speaking world, Novalis was first praised in 1829 by Thomas Carlyle, whose enthusiasm spread ultimately to writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, and George MacDonald.

In the poetry anthology News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (1980), the American poet Robert Bly justly lauded Novalis as a prime shaper of modern poetic consciousness. Such an evaluation offers hope that Novalis will continue to gain recognition as an internationally important forerunner of both modern poetry and literary theory, especially as more of his literary and theoretical works become accessible in translation.

BIOGRAPHY

Novalis was born Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, the first son of Heinrich Ulrich Erasmus von Hardenberg, a strict member of the pietistic Herrnhut sect, and Auguste Bernhardine von Bölzig. Throughout his life, Novalis attempted to reconcile the practical demands of his father with the poetic inspiration he claimed first to have received from his mother. Novalis’s acquaintance with the popular poet Gottfried August Bürger in 1789 intensified his early literary aspirations, but encouraged by his father to pursue an administrative career, Novalis began the study of law at the University of Jena in 1790. Although his lyric output during his stay in Jena seems to have abated, he soon found his poetic proclivities rekindled and redirected by the poet Friedrich Schiller, who was then a professor of history at the university. Under Schiller’s spell, the young Novalis became more introspective and sought a solid foundation for his life and poetry. With this new outlook, he bowed to paternal pressure and transferred to the University of Leipzig in 1791. His experience there once again only strengthened his literary and philosophical interests, however, for it was in Leipzig that he began his friendship and fruitful intellectual exchange with Schlegel, the brilliant theorist of German Romanticism. Only after taking up studies in Wittenberg did he receive his law degree, in 1794.

After several carefree months with his family in Weissenfels, Novalis was apprenticed by his father to Coelestin August Just, the district director of Thuringia , who lived in Tennstedt. It was during his first months there that Hardenberg came to know the twelve-year-old Sophie von Kühn of nearby Grüningen, who revived his active poetic imagination and became a central figure in his new poetic attempts. Within a year, they were engaged, but Sophie’s serious illness led to her death in March, 1797. Sophie’s death, followed by the loss of his brother Erasmus in April, shattered Novalis, and he turned inward to come to grips with the experience of death. This experience, certainly the most crucial of his life, helped him to articulate his mission to transcend the dual nature of existence through poetry. His confrontation with death did not weaken his will to live or cause him to flee from life, as is sometimes claimed; rather, it was a catalytic event that enabled him to reorient his life and focus his imaginative powers on the fusion of life and poetry.

With a new, clearly poetic mission before him, Novalis could commit himself to life; it was at this time that he assumed the pen name (meaning “preparer of new land”) by which he is known. By the end of 1797, he had resumed his intense study of the Idealist philosophers Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Novalis’s interest in science grew also, and in December, he commenced studies at the Freiberg Mining Academy, which would later give him a career. In the next year, he not only published the philosophical aphorisms of Blütenstaub and Glauben und Liebe, but also attempted to articulate his own philosophical ideas in a novel, The Disciples of Sais. By December, 1798, his involvement in life embraced the domestic once again, and he became engaged to Julie von Charpentier.

Novalis had finally reconciled his poetic mission with the practical demands of life and career. During 1799, he not only worked on Devotional Songs and Hymns to the Night, which had grown out of the crisis of 1797, but also accepted an appointment to the directorate of the Saxon salt mines. Both his career and his literary endeavors flourished. In 1800, he worked on Henry of Ofterdingen, conducted a significant geological survey of Saxony, published Hymns to the Night, and wrote some of his best poems. However, illness had overpowered Novalis’s resolve to live and fulfill his poetic mission. On March 25, 1801, Novalis died in the family home in Weissenfels. A few days before his death, he had said to his brother Carl: “When I am well again, then you will finally learn what poetry is. In my head I have magnificent poems and songs.” These died with him.

ANALYSIS

The late eighteenth century in Germany was a time of new beginnings. The gradual change from a feudal to a capitalistic society bestowed a new importance on the individual, as reflected in the philosophy of German Idealism, which emphasized the primacy of the subjective imagination. At the same time, however, the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire gave rise to a new sense of German nationalism. German writers responded to these changes by seeking to initiate a new literary tradition, a new beginning that would free them from the tyranny of foreign taste and example. Understandably, in such a dynamic age, no single, unified movement emerged, and the literary pioneers—writers as diverse as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Klopstock, and Christoph Martin Wieland—set out in many different directions. Nevertheless, by the end of the century, Schlegel would proclaim that he lived “not in hope but in the certainty of a new dawn of a new poetry.”

Schlegel’s optimism was based on his conviction that his contemporaries were on the verge of creating a new mythology, a new Romantic poetry in which the newly emerging self would examine its own depths and discover universal truths, ultimately achieving a synthesis of subject and object. Like the literature of the eighteenth century, the poetry of Novalis moved toward the realization of this Romantic goal. While he experimented with many styles in his early works, betraying his debt to various currents of the Enlightenment, he soon developed a personal Romantic voice and new mode of expression that marked the advent of a new poetic age. This development became more obvious after Sophie’s death in 1797, but it is evident even in the poems of his literary apprenticeship (1788-1793). Indeed, many themes that preoccupied Novalis after the crisis of 1797 had already surfaced in his earliest poetry. The theme of death and the dual images of night and darkness, for example, find their initial expression in early poems, although at this stage his poetry was largely imitative. Only after his encounter with Schiller and his relationship with Sophie, which made him more introspective, did Novalis strike out on his own to record his own experiences and the changes that had taken place within himself. He was then able to create a consistent vision, a vision proclaiming the transforming power of love and raising personal experience to the level of mythology. In transforming his subjective experience into universal symbolism, Novalis created the Romantic mythology that Schlegel had proclaimed the sine qua non of the new poetic age. In his last poems, which envision the return to paradise brought on by the union of poetry and love, Novalis transcended his personal experience to create symbolic artifacts behind which the poet himself nearly disappears. In his lyric poetry, then, Novalis ultimately reveals himself not only as a pioneer of Romanticism but also as a precursor of Symbolism.

If Novalis’s last poems are thematically consistent and anticipate the Symbolist movement, his early poems are endlessly diversified and echo the Enlightenment. In the poets of the eighteenth century, the young writer, searching for a poetic voice, found his models, limited only by his eclectic taste. Besides translations from classical poetry, Novalis composed serious political verse influenced by the work of Friedrich Stolberg and Karl Ramler, and in the bardic tradition of Klopstock; Rococo lyrics under the particular influence of Wieland; elegiac verse echoing Ludwig Christoph Heinrich Hölty and Schiller; and a spate of lyrics in the style of Bürger. The variety of these early attempts, the assorted literary models that they imitate, and the poems showing a young poet experimenting with traditional forms (such as the invented necrologues addressed to living family members) reveal a writer in quest of a suitable mode of expression.

“TO A FALLING LEAF”

While they do share some common concerns, many of which inform the later writings, the early poems lack the unified vision and unique perspective that would come later with Novalis’s Romantic lyrics. Poems that foreshadow later developments also contrast significantly with the more mature poetry. The first version of the poem “An ein fallendes Blatt” (“To a Falling Leaf”), written in 1789, paints a melancholy scene in which the approach of winter storms is compared to the approach of death. The melancholy tone, however, is purposely undercut by a conclusion that affirms death as a joyous experience of the eternal that need not be feared. This view of death hints, perhaps, at the thanatopsis that Novalis would elaborate in Hymns to the Night, but it is merely a hint, for here the idea is actually no more than a common poetic cliché, and the poem as a whole lacks the visionary perspective that underlies the later works. This poem’s persona, in fact, is barely visible at all, and his emotional response to death’s coming at the end of the poem is expressed impersonally: “Oh happy …/ One need not then fear the storm/ That forbids us our earthly life.” The persona and his climactic emotional exclamation vanish behind the anonymous “one,” and death—which had been only indirectly introduced through a comparison—loses not only its sting, as the poet intended, but its poetic bite as well.

“EVENING”

The poem “Der Abend” (“Evening”), probably written in the same year as “To a Falling Leaf” but in many ways a more suggestive and complex work, not only has a more directly involved and visible persona but also links death and night in anticipation of Hymns to the Night. This poem’s persona, who stands in a sympathetic relationship to a thoroughly personified nature, perceives and responds to a serene evening by wishing that “the evening of my life” might be “more peaceful still than this/ Evening of the countryside.” The lovely yet decidedly rational comparison of the soul to nature is still far removed from the Romantic identification of self and nature that can be found in Novalis’s last poems—for example, in “Der Himmel war umzogen” (“The Heavens Were Covered”). Moreover, despite the reflective mood that nature inspires in the persona, this is not an introspective poem like those found among Novalis’s first truly Romantic poems. “Evening” does not yet focus primarily on the poetic self but on the eighteenth century ideal of bucolic harmony. Similarly, the persona’s final wish, that his “soul might slumber over to eternal peace” in the same way that the weary farmer “slumbers over” toward the next day, only tentatively prefigures the ideas and vocabulary of Hymns to the Night. The link between death and sleep remains, after all, an eighteenth century cliché, and its onedimensional appearance here only lightly foreshadows Novalis’s later and much more complex symbol of the eternal and truly visionary “holy sleep.”

This poem, like “To a Falling Leaf,” is still controlled by a rationalistic poetic consciousness. Simile, not symbol, is the rhetorical means of linking humanity and nature; subject and object are linked, not synthesized. This is the overriding technique of the early poems. The transcendent vision based on deep self-reflection and the unifying power of the imagination is not found here. The poet of “Evening” is one step closer to the Romantic poet of Hymns to the Night than the poet of “To a Falling Leaf,” but the Romantic poet whose feelings, perceptions, and very self are the basis of Romantic expression steps forward only tentatively. Before he could free himself from his Enlightenment models, focus his vision, and become the very subject of his Romantic art, Novalis would first need to know himself.

“ON A SATURDAY EVENING”

The experience of love and death in his relationship with Sophie was the catalyst that would initiate important changes in Novalis’s writings, the lens through which he would ultimately bring into sharper focus the themes and images that had been hinted at in the early poems. Initially, however, the experience led to self-examination and the definition of a new, more Romantic voice. Much of the poetry from this period—and there is relatively little—records the changes that the Sophie experience caused in Novalis, and it is, consequently, largely confessional, reflective poetry in which the poet himself becomes the subject.

In the poem “Am Sonnabend Abend” (“On a Saturday Evening”), for example, the persona expresses his astonishment at the transformation that has taken place within himself since his relationship with Sophie: “Am I still the one who yesterday morning/ Sang hymns to the god of frivolity….” This confession suggests not only the changes that had affected a once frivolous university student but also those poetic changes that had occurred in the former poet of lighthearted Anacreontic verse. Earlier, in 1791, Novalis had expressed similar reservations about his lifestyle and youthful verse in “A Youth’s Laments,” a poem written under the maturing influence of Schiller, but it was only after Novalis had met Sophie that his inner reorientation became complete and the poet could begin anew.

“BEGINNING”

In the poem “Anfang” (“Beginning”), Novalis analyzes the nature of Sophie’s effect on him and argues that his new state of mind is not “intoxication” (that is, illusion) but rather “higher consciousness,” which Sophie as a mediator had revealed. This aptly titled poem is in several ways profoundly significant for Novalis’s development as a Romantic poet. In the first place, its conclusion that higher consciousness not be mistaken for intoxication admits a new Romantic form of perception that is aggressively antirationalistic. Second, the characterization of Sophie, the embodiment of love, as a female mediator between visible and invisible worlds, not only marks the first use of this central Romantic image in Novalis’s work but also signals the inception of a Romantic theory of Symbolism, which posits the fusion of the finite with the infinite. Finally, the intensely introspective persona, whose theme is his own consciousness (“the growth of a poet’s mind,” as William Wordsworth put it), places this poem directly into the Romantic tradition.

In “Beginning,” Novalis’s new vision, based on the higher consciousness inspired by Sophie, assumes a universal import transcending the initially personal experience. This is manifest in the last lines of the poem, where the private experience of the poet is superseded by a vision of humanity raised to a new level of existence:

Someday mankind will be what Sophie

Is to me now—perfected—moral grace—

Then will its higher consciousness

No longer be confused with the mist of wine.

THE STRANGER

The poems Novalis wrote in 1798 and 1799 in Freiberg after Sophie’s death confirm this universalizing tendency. In fact, the relative paucity of poems written in the wake of the experience itself suggests that Novalis was not simply concerned with self-indulgent solipsistic effusions. (The one poem written shortly after Sophie’s death in 1797, while Novalis was still in Tennstedt, is a humorous composition commemorating the Just family’s purchase of a garden.) Similarly, it has been pointed out that Novalis probably chose the classical verse forms of the Freiberg poems as a more objective medium for his universal themes. One can also point to the objectifying perspective of the several poems that analyze the self from a point of view once removed. In both “Der Fremdling” (“The Stranger”), written in January, 1798, and “Der müde Fremdling ist verschwunden” (“The Weary Stranger Has Disappeared”), a fragment from one year later, Novalis—the stranger—analyzes his initial alienation after Sophie’s death and then his self-rediscovery through a persona who “speaks … for him.” This allows Novalis to remain in the introspective mode, making use of his experience, yet standing at an objective distance. As a consequence, the stranger symbolizes any individual who seeks the return of the paradise he has lost, “that heavenly land.”

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

The major poems of the Freiberg period are inhabited by seekers who ultimately find themselves. Introspection leading to self-revelation is the goal and method of these poems, but the path inward does not lead to solipsism. Self-knowledge, as Novalis teaches in “Kenne dich selbst” (“Know Thyself”), results in a deep knowledge of nature’s mysteries as well. Moreover, because his own path to self-knowledge, which had been prepared by the guiding spirit of love, led to higher consciousness, Novalis interprets his experience as a symbol. He imbues his introspective poems with a universal significance, as in these lines from “Letzte Liebe” (“Last Love”):

As the mother wakes her darling from slumber with a

   kiss,

As he first sees her and comes to understand himself

   through her:

So love with me—through love did I first experience

   the world,

Find myself, and become what as a lover one becomes.

What one—anyone, not just Novalis—becomes when a lover, is a poet. The successful seeker of love and self-knowledge is called, like the poet addressed in “Der sterbende Genius” (“The Dying Genius”), to “sing the song of return,” the myth of the return to paradise.

Having found himself again, Novalis defined for himself a Romantic mission: to transform his personal experience through poetry into a universal vision of love, which would lead others inward along the path to self-knowledge, higher consciousness, and rebirth: “Toward the East sing then the lofty song,/ Until the sun rises and ignites/ And opens for me the gates of the primeval world.”

HYMNS TO THE NIGHT

In Hymns to the Night, the gates of eternity are opened not by the rising sun—the conventional symbol of rebirth—but by the fall of darkness and night. This poetic work is Novalis’s “lofty song,” “the song of return,” the clearest and most complete fulfillment of his Romantic mission. In it, Novalis transforms his personal experience of Sophie’s death—to be precise, his ostensibly mystical experience at her graveside on May 13, 1797—into a universalized vision of death and night as a realm of higher consciousness and eternal love.

Hymns to the Night was not merely an immediate emotional response to Sophie’s death. Although he might have begun work on an early version in the fall of 1797, Novalis resumed serious work on the cycle only in late 1799 and early 1800, when he was well over his initial grief and actively involved in life. Moreover, the textual changes that he made between setting down that version in manuscript and publishing a still later prose version in the journal Athenäum in 1800 show a conscious effort to rise above personal experience and indicate that his goal was not autobiography but symbolism.

Unlike the fragmentary verse epic of 1789, Orpheus, which uses a classical myth to examine the theme of death, Hymns to the Night makes personal experience the basis of a broad symbolism utilizing elements of various mythological systems (including the theme of Orpheus). Although the first three hymns describe principally the poet’s own experience of “the holy, ineffable, mysterious night”—his own Orphic descent to the realm of death—the work begins significantly with a more universal reference to all living creatures in the world of light. Among these stands “the magnificent stranger” who is man himself. As in the Freiberg poems, the stranger symbolizes the universal seeker of a lost paradise. From this broad context, it becomes clear that the persona, himself a stranger in the rational world of light, is representative and his experience symbolic. This universality is reinforced in the fourth hymn when, for example, the symbol of the Cross, which at first signifies Sophie’s death and links her to Christ, is finally called “the victory banner of our race.” The fifth hymn continues to broaden the significance of the poet’s experience by restating his subjective development toward an understanding of death in terms of humankind’s changing relationship to death in history. In the sixth and final hymn, subjective experience coalesces completely with the universal. Not only is the mediating beloved explicitly identified with Christ, but also the poet’s individual voice is transformed into a universal “we” singing a communal hymn of praise. The stranger, who in the Freiberg poems had given up his voice to the poet who spoke for him, here lends his voice to the chorus of humankind.

DEVOTIONAL SONGS

Devotional Songs, also written during the years 1799 through 1800, were similarly intended to raise personal experience to the level of universal—if not entirely orthodox—religious symbolism. This is evident not only from the symbols that the poems share with Hymns to the Night—for example, the eroticism of Christ the beloved—but also from the shared communal context and implications. Novalis had tentatively planned these songs as part of “a new, spiritual hymnal”; in them, the Sophie experience is so thoroughly transformed by virtue of the pervasive Christian imagery that many have been adopted (and sometimes adapted) for use in hymnals.

The songs, which are sometimes confessional, sometimes exhortative, are all informed by Novalis’s self-conscious mission to reveal the role of love in the re-creation of the earth. The ninth song, for example, which proclaims the day of Resurrection to be “a festival of the world’s rejuvenation,” is more than a profession of religious faith in the coming of God’s kingdom; it is a self-conscious profession of faith in the poet’s mission to reveal that kingdom in humanity’s midst:

I say to each that he lives

And has been resurrected

That he hovers in our midst

And is with us forever.

I say to each and each says

To his friends anon

That soon everywhere

The new kingdom of heaven will dawn.

In truly Romantic fashion, the voice of the prophet is first and foremost the voice of a poet, speaking out of his own experience but in the service of a still higher cause and announcing to all humankind the advent of a world renewed by love, which is made manifest in his words.

“THE POEM”

Novalis’s last poems are almost exclusively concerned with the renewal of the universe and the return to the Golden Age; their vision is more explicitly secular and aesthetic than that which informs Hymns to the Night and Devotional Songs. Here, Novalis’s belief that poetry itself can transform the world receives full expression, and many of these last works are indeed poems about poems, in which Novalis’s personal experience is not the focus.

Such is the case in the significantly titled poem “Das Gedicht” (“The Poem”). The anonymous persona who speaks for humankind in its fallen state relates how “a lost page”—a poetic saga—inspires in the present a vision of the past Golden Age and keeps alive the hope for its return. Because it is able to unite past and future in the present and give form to the spirit of love, the poem itself temporarily re-creates the Golden Age. The paramount concern of “The Poem,” then, is precisely what the title announces it to be: the poem—not simply the ancient saga and not even Novalis’s poem in itself, but all poems, the poem per se. In its ability to unite subject and object, spirit and matter, every poem becomes a medium of higher consciousness and the salvation of the world.

“TO TIECK”

Once poetry becomes a major theme in Novalis’s work, a new poetic voice emerges. The reflective persona that had spoken in the introspective poems of 1794 to 1799 is silenced. In “The Poem,” for example, the reflective self is replaced by an essentially impersonal persona. This is no longer a case of a poet reflecting on himself but of poetry reflecting on itself. In the poem “An Tieck” (“To Tieck”), another anonymous persona narrates the tale of a child’s discovery of an ancient book and an encounter with Jakob Boehme, which presage the coming of the Golden Age.

Despite the dedicatory title and autobiographical allusions in the poem (Tieck had introduced Novalis to Boehme’s writings), the personal significance has been entirely transformed by the symbolism of the poem. The dominance of myth in these last poems precludes the need for a personal voice, as it does in the novel Henry of Ofterdingen of the same period. If early poems such as “To a Falling Leaf” resort to an anonymous voice because Novalis lacked experience, then the final poems do so because he succeeded in rising above his personal experience.

AUTONOMOUS LATE POEMS

The appearance of a first-person voice among the late poems does not contradict this conclusion. A number of poems in which the poet speaks in the first person were in fact intended for fictional characters in Henry of Ofterdingen. In some of these and in others not intended for the novel, the persona himself becomes part of an integrated mythos. Such poems are distinct from earlier reflective works such as “Beginning” and “Last Love.”

Although the late poems also describe the changing consciousness of the persona, they do so in symbolic terms and not in the largely expository or intellectual manner of the earlier poems. Whereas the poet of “Beginning” simply states that Sophie has led him to higher consciousness, the speaker of “Es färbte sich die Wiese grün” (“The Meadow Turned Green”) tells the story of his rebirth by narrating his experience of spring and love: During a walk deeper and deeper into the forest, the persona marvels uncomprehendingly at the transformation of nature; he then encounters a young girl and, hidden from the sun in deep shadows, suddenly understands intuitively the changes both in nature and within himself.

One can easily discern the same theme that dominated the Freiberg poems: The spirit of love, embodied by a female mediator, reveals the higher consciousness that leads to knowledge of self and of the external world. In this narrative plot, however, the theme has been thoroughly mythologized. The symbols which Novalis uses here and in all his late poems are autonomous, stripped of all but the most general personal relevance. The forest, the sun, the girl, springtime—all these derive their mythological significance from their shared archetypal context.

“The Meadow Turned Green” is autonomous, too, in that it reflects back upon itself. It is, after all, not merely a description of revelation and the path to higher consciousness; it is both the direct result of the poet’s epiphany and the re-creation of it. The poem describes and mythologizes its own creation.

The process of objectifying and imbuing his personal experience with universal meaning that Novalis had begun in the poems of 1794 to 1799 was completed in his last poems, in which he totally transforms experience into myth, into symbols which have no fixed meanings outside themselves. This creation of a reflexive and fully autonomous poetry was a significant landmark on the road to nineteenth century symbolism. To reach this stage and to find his own poetic voice, it was not enough for Novalis that he free himself from Enlightenment models and create a poetry of the self. He also needed to rise above the self and to create a mythological poetry. For this, he needed a poetic voice that not only spoke from the core of his experience but also spoke in the universal language of symbolism. In achieving this goal, Novalis fulfilled the Romantic ideal of becoming like God the Creator, whose creative voice echoes eternally throughout his autonomous creation while he hovers silently above.

OTHER MAJOR WORKS

LONG FICTION: Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, 1802 (The Disciples at Sais, 1903); Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1802 (Henry of Ofterdingen, 1842).

NONFICTION: Blütenstaub, 1798; Glauben und Liebe, 1798; Das Allgemeine Brouillon, 1798-1799 (Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, 2007); Die Christenheit oder Europa, 1826 (Christianity or Europe, 1844); Philosophical Writings, 1997; The Birth of Novalis: Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797, with Selected Letters and Documents, 2007.

MISCELLANEOUS: Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose of Novalis, 1989.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freeman, Veronica G. The Poetization of Metaphors in the Work of Novalis. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. This work examines mysticism and Romanticism in the works of Novalis and his use of metaphors.

Hodkinson, James R. Women and Writing in the Works of Novalis: Transformation Beyond Measure? Rochester , N.Y.: Camden House, 2007. Hodkinson examines how Novalis was affected by women, including Sophie von Kühn, and how this is evident in his writing.

Holland, Jocelyn. German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter. New York: Routledge, 2009. Holland compares and contrasts the works of Novalis, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johann Wilhelm Ritter, paying particular attention to the idea of procreation.

Kennedy, Clare. Paradox, Aphorism, and Desire in Novalis and Derrida. London: Maney, for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008. Kennedy examines the themes of desire and paradoxes in the aphorisms of Novalis and philosophercritic Jacques Derrida.

Molnár, Géza von. Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Highly philosophical approach to the life and work of Novalis. Discussion of his work involves detailed expositions of Novalis’s interpretations of Kantian and Fichtean philosophy. Also examines Novalis’s relationship with Sophie von Kühn, his novel Henry of Ofterdingen, and his visionary poems in Hymns to the Night.

Neubauer, John. Novalis. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Excellent general introduction to Novalis, tailored to English-speaking readers. Interweaves the life and work to show the relationship between the two and also discusses Novalis both as a visionary and as a logical thinker. Includes discussions of Novalis’s contributions to science, philosophy, the novel, poetry, politics, and religion. Includes bibliography and chronology.

Newman, Gail M. Locating the Romantic Subject. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Complex interpretation of the life and work of Novalis in light of the modern object-relations theory of British psychologist D. W. Winnicott. Particular emphasis on Novalis’s major novel, Henry of Ofterdingen, as a psychoanalytic case study.

O’Brien, William Arctander. Novalis: Signs of Revolution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Examines both the life and the work of Novalis with the purpose of contradicting “the myth of Novalis” as a dreamy, death-obsessed mystic. Sees Novalis as the quintessential early German Romantic. A chapter called “The Making of Sophie” brings new perspectives to Novalis’s profound experience with the young Sophie von Kühn.

Donald P. Haase