Journal Article

Eichendorff’s Echoes: Sound and Transience in the Romantic Era

Tucker, Brian

2024

Overview

This essay explores the acoustic dimension in Joseph von Eichendorff’s poetry. It draws a new connection between Eichendorff’s negative, modern element and his reliance on a limited vocabulary of sonic phenomena. Eichendorff often uses poetic means to depict an abrupt realization of transience, and I argue that he employs the nature of sound as one way to do so. By contrasting the ephemeral quality of man-made sounds with the ambient, droning noise of nature, Eichendorff is able to convey a discrepancy between the subject’s illusions of permanence and continuity and the reality of temporal loss. Moreover, his poetry extends that intimation of transience to Romanticism itself. His use of the ephemeral, unpreservable nature of sound undercuts the suspicion that he merely recombines images from earlier Romantic writers. When his works echo the most familiar tropes of Romantic poetry, they simultaneously point to the inevitable withering away of sound and thus of the very modes of Romantic expression those sounds exemplify. Attending to the acoustic dimension in Eichendorff’s poetry furthermore provides a case study that contributes to the growing awareness of the centrality of sound in the Age of Goethe.

• Publisher: North American Goethe Society,Boydell & Brewer
• Subject: Acoustics / Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969) / Allegory / Case studies / Lyric poetry / Modernism / Poetry / Poets / Romanticism / Sound / Weddings