NOTES ON THE ROMANTICITY OF A FADE-OUT: SHELLEY, BLAKE AND JEAN PAUL RICHTER

Abstract

To contextualize the readings of the two poems, the paper reviews the known “textual circumstances” of Shelley’s “Music when soft voices die” and Blake’s “Leave, O leave me to my sorrows”, before examining Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s views of romanticity as “spaciousness” (even the “spaciousness” of sound). The readings of the two poems in the framework of the aforementioned textual contextualization and Jean Paul’s prose, show not only a similarity between the poems themselves and between the poems and Richter’s prose, but also a connection between the concepts of “spaciousness” and Weltschmerz as they are read in the poems.