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Neophilologus (2009) 93:295310 DOI 10.1007/s11061-007-9087-3
Peter J. Burgard
Published online: 17 October 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract Analysis of the use of Petrarchistic conceits in German Baroque poetry reveals how poets as ostensibly diverse as Opitz, Zesen, and Hoffmannswaldau employ the gurative language of the Petrarchistic idiom in order to reveal its insufciency and, in the process of their critique, to recuperate the difference and thus the expressive potential of metaphor. We rst discover this critique in Opitzs Sonnet uber die augen der Astree and then its intensication in Zesens Auf die Augen seiner Liben. Hoffmannswaldaus Auff ihre schultern adopts the correctio model found in Opitz and Zesen, but is even more urgent in its critical interrogation of the Petrarchistic formulae. Here, and then most vividly in Beschreibung vollkommener schonheit, Hoffmannswaldau, by syntactic means, remetaphorizes those dead metaphors.
Introduction
Petrarchism is the erotic system of the German Baroque. Central to this system is the male lyrical subject who is a besotted lover eternally pleading with the target of his affection. She, however, is indifferent to him and does not requite his love, but rather lets him suffer and despair. In order to win her over, the infatuated man, as poet, composes ever more extreme panegyrics in the form of hyperbolic and standardized metaphorsconceitsfor her beauty. His love, because of his hypertrophied investment in it and because it is so ungraciously unrequited, can easily invert into its antithesis, enmity toward the woman. This antithetical tension has been understood as a system-debilitating contradiction, ein eklatanter Widerspruch [...] zwischen gottlicher Schonheit [...] und abgrundiger FeindschaftI think mistakenly, since
P. J. Burgard (&)
Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USAe-mail: [email protected]
Dead Metaphor Society?
From Opitz to Hoffmannswaldau
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the praise and the enmity are part of the same erotic system.1 Regardless of the poets momentary mood, however, one thing remains constant in the description of the beloved: recourse to a treasury of elaborate and sometimes abstruse gures of speech. Examination of the deployment of such Petrarchan conceits in four poemsone each by Opitz and Zesen and two by Hoffmannswaldauwill demonstrate the subversive function and concomitant expressive potential of metaphor in German Baroque poetry.
Such examination also...