Gesammelte Werke

resembles Charles Baudelaire with whom he shares some amazingly specific motives, such as the glorification of lie, the phenomenon of the »crowd« (summoned also by Poe), the »phantom double« – motives which belong essentially to modern urbanism.
    Just since Heine's affinity to the Baudelairian romanticism of disillusionment is so striking, the difference between the two, which does not merely consist in Baudelaire's being spiritually »later«, enables us better to understand the problem of Heine. Baudelaire, too, faced a sober and »unpoetic« world which he did not want to escape but rather transfigure into what might be called a negative imagery. The way he chose to achieve this was a heroic one and it is not accidental that the poet styles himself throughout his work as a hero. While surrendering himself unreservedly to the experiences and shocks of the merciless big city, he tries at the same time to absorb those shocks by an extreme emphasis on poetic form and on the distance between poetry and every day life. This is what Paul Claudel described in his statement that Baudelaire represents a mixture between the journalist style of his time and the classicism of Racine.
    Heine's resolution of the same situation went to exactly the opposite direction. To be sure, there is no lack of the journalist element in his poetry. As a matter of fact, he introduced this element into German verse. But there is no Racine to counter-balance it, partly because no tradition of equal authenticity was available in Germany, partly because the only literary figure in Germany who truly and substantially represented the idea of a »high style«, Goethe, was the very same against whose authority Heine's school, the writers of the »Young Germany«, were in violent rebellion. Instead of enhancing the distance between poetry and the empirical world, between lyrical language and the ordinary spoken word, Heine tried to cut down this distance radically. If the »great style« had lost its substance, Heine tried to salvage this substance by giving up the great style. As an artistic principle he consciously introduced triteness, banality, the hackneyed and the conventionalized. He attempted to translate the subtlest and most moving experiences into the vernacular of drawing room conversation. His work exploits incessantly the contrast between romantic content, namely boundless sublime love, and sobering, sometimes slovenly, yet often striking and concise expression.
    It is this particular configuration which defines Heine's novelty and made for his tremendous effectiveness. By cutting down the distance between poetic and empirical language, he also cut down the distance between the poet and his audience. In doing so he utilized two formal models supplied by German tradition. One of them is Goethe's idea of
Gelegenheitsdichtung,
poetry written for an occasion, which was originally conceived in order to emphasize the spontaneity of subjective experience against the dry pedantry of German Rococo. He followed up this idea to an extreme, delivering himself, as it were, to the senseless contingency of the life of a »man of the crowd« without even attempting to present this life as meaningful but rather expressing its meaninglessness, reflecting the break between the poetic subject and the objective world. Love is conceived as the only bridge between the two:
»Und wäre nicht das bißchen Liebe, man hätte nirgends einen Halt«,
but even this »hold« is precarious, for the substance of love itself is in jeopardy, it is only »that bit of love«, which does not take itself quite seriously in the midst of universal alienation.
    The second pattern by which Heine attempted to cut down the distance was the
folksong.
He was close to it both through primary contact in his Rhenish home province, and through the romantic school which had made a cult of the folksong. But he changed the meaning of this pattern. Whereas it was supposed in earlier romanticism to raise poetry beyond the level of the private by constituting a link to what the reactionary romantic philosophers and historians of law called
Volksgeist,
folk spirit, Heine made use of the looseness and flexibility of rhythm and tone of the folk song so as to make it befit highly individualized, differentiated psychological impulses. What was once a device of creating the »semblance of the well-known«, of social objectivity, was put by him into the service of radical subjectivism.
    The