Pondering on "Poetry and Truth"
Abstract
The author suggests translating Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit as Fiction and Truth, which services as the starting point to trace different links between these two terms in Goethe and certain figures of the Klassik and German Romanticism. What Fichte formulated as the idea of the productive imagination, the first Romanticism turned into the total liberation of fantasy. For Novalis, the world of fantasy nearly matched the real world. Hölderlin, starting from his descent into madness, held that the fiction of the “Greek gods” prevailed over “truth”. Wagner, for his part, created a world of truth for his “Nordic gods”. Finally, in Goethe, the literary image and its productive character is what serves as a refuge for the divine. Yet fiction and truth are two sides of the same coin, wherein fiction validates its truth and vice versa.
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