Dialogue beyond Death: Epic Endings in Klopstock’s ‘Der Messias’, Goethe’s ‘Faust’ and Rilke’s ‘Duineser Elegien’
Speaker: Katrin Kohl (University of Oxford); Welcome/introduction: T.J. Reed (President, English Goethe Society)
The talk explores how Klopstock, Goethe and Rilke exploit the finality of an epic ending to depict both death and a journey beyond it. ‘Der Messias’, ‘Faust’ and the ‘Duineser Elegien’ differ markedly in terms of genre, yet Goethe competes with his predecessor’s epic by creating a tragedy of epic length and cosmic reach while the elegiac speaker in Rilke’s most ambitious work responds to the voice and hexameter rhythms in Klopstock’s epic.
By contrast with the great classical epics of antiquity, which end with the deaths of the heroes’ antagonists, the endings of these three works extend beyond the finality of death. Like Klopstock, Goethe takes his protagonist up a vertical cosmic trajectory accompanied by the celebrations of celestial choruses, whilst Rilke depicts the journey of an unnamed youth through a mythical landscape imbued with symbols of death into which the youth eventually merges in silence. The ending of Klopstock’s religious epic marks the culmination of God’s redemptive act while Goethe and Rilke conclude their more secular works with brief poetic codas that articulate timeless maxims touching respectively on themes of gender and ecology: Goethe extols the elevating force of ‘das Ewig-Weibliche’; Rilke poignantly celebrates the modest fertility of the falling catkin. The lecture argues that the differences between the three projects are as important as the correspondences in shaping a distinctive tradition that draws energy from its dialogic complexity.
Katrin Kohl is a Fellow and Tutor in German at Jesus College, Oxford, and Professor of German Literature at the University of Oxford.