Coda: The ‘German’ Oehlenschläger

Summary

British Romanticism and Denmark has traced a multifaceted discourse about modern Denmark across a wide range of different areas of enquiry and genres of cultural productivity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. In so doing, the book has had a twofold purpose. First: to recover a significant but still largely unfamiliar aspect of the cultural history of Britain during the Romantic period. Second, and by extension: to further scholarly understanding of Romanticism as a European phenomenon by exploring how individual national Romanticisms interacted across political and linguistic borders. This book has shown how the idea of a ‘Northern’ cultural identity shared between Britain and Denmark, and rooted in constructions of the classical Scandinavian past, played an important role in the emergence and development of Romanticism and Romantic nationalism in both countries.

In order to shed some final light on the extent to which British Romantic-period writers themselves invoked this paradigm of a regional or transnational Romanticism, while at the same time showing themselves aware of the many complexities which that paradigm involved, I want to turn, in this Coda, to an essay on the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) which was published in Charles Ollier’s (1788–1859) Literary Miscellany in the autumn of 1820. Ollier is chiefly remembered today as the publisher of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and John Keats (1795–1821). Ollier’s Literary Miscellany, which ran to only a single number, is remembered, if it is remembered at all, because it carried Thomas Love Peacock’s (1785–1866) essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’. This, of course, was the essay which prompted Peacock’s friend Percy Bysshe Shelley to compose his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1821), one of the best-known works of Romantic-period criticism, and a work very much concerned to examine the history of European literature, which Shelley planned to publish in the second number of the Miscellany. The 1820 number also carried what was intended to be the first of a series of essays On the German Drama’, by the English theologian Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855), who would later translate into English some stories by the German Romantic-period writer Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853). This first essay took as its subject the Copenhagen-born poet and playwright Adam Oehlenschläger, whom Hare characterises as ‘the great poet of Denmark’.