Twenty years ago, D. O. Spettigue discovered that the Canadian author Frederick Philip Grove had spent the first thirty years of his life as Felix Paul Greve in Germany. Greve was a marginal literary figure, and an immensely productive translator of contemporary English and French literature and world classics. For both authors, poetry seems to have played a lesser role than other genres, and yet, their poems provide the most conclusive connection between their two seemingly different identities: among six German poems by Grove, one was published by Greve some twenty years earlier.
Bringing together Grove's largely unpublished poetry and whatever has been unearthed so far of Greve's poems in one critical edition has the purpose of making this important material available to an ever growing scholarly community in Canada and abroad in a single, convenient place. Until now, these poems have been accessible in a fashion only at the University of Manitoba Archives, where they are furthermore divided between the Grove and Spettigue collections. Some important sources, such as the three German poems in the Grove Collection, are either omitted altogether, or misrepresented in the Register which makes their retrieval virtually impossible.
Very little of Grove's poetry ever appeared in print during his lifetime, and critical attention to it is nearly non-existent. All of Grove's poems in this edition stem from the University of Manitoba archival collections. In comparison with Grove's, proportionally much of Greve's poetry was published and reviewed, but it is chronologically so remote, and exists in such arcane places by today's standards, that access to it represents practical problems similar to those arising from the consultation of archival materials. Apart from the known sources available in the Grove archives, fifteen newly discovered poems by Greve have been included here, eight of which were never published.
Within the first year of his discovery of the Greve/Grove identity in October 1971, Spettigue had secured an impressive host of biographical and literary documents linking the German and Canadian authors. All of them point to Greve's and Grove's identity, but since each point of identification lacks documentary support in itself, their identity is indicated mostly through the cumulative effect of biographical correspondences, such as the same birthdate, slight alterations in names, a German-Russian border town as birthplace, schooling in a Hamburg Gymnasium, studies in Bonn and Munich, etc.
Surprisingly, the strongest literary connection between Grove and Greve had escaped Spettigue's attention until May, 1973: Grove's manuscript poem "Die Dünen fliegen auf..." (MP 1) is almost identical to "Erster Sturm" which Greve published in the journal Die Schaubühne in 1907. While Spettigue had obtained all available poems by Greve, and Grove's son Leonard had already, in 1968, given him three German poems by Grove, he was unaware of Grove's German poems in Winnipeg.[7] In May 1973, Spettigue's book FPG: the European Years was in the advanced production stages. This explains why this pivotal information, which to date is still the most conclusive literary evidence that Grove was formerly Greve, was belatedly inserted in a mere nine-line paragraph on p. 144.
Recently, the unpublished autobiography of Else Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, who was Greve's companion for a decade, has lent direct biographical support to the Greve/Grove identity.[9] The best previous biographical information was provided in an autobiographical account which Greve submitted to Brümmer, the editor of Lexicon der deutschen Dichter and Prosaisten,[10] in 1907. It was published in the 1913 edition, and reads like a blueprint of Grove's self-disclosures in his autobiographical novels A Search for America (1927) and In Search of Myself (1946).
This is not the place to provide a detailed account of either Greve's or Grove's lives. Suffice it to recall the most significant dates for both: Greve was born in Radomno which was indeed a "Russian-German border town" after 1918, but not in 1879. He grew up in Hamburg, studied classical philology and archaeology in Bonn and Munich, where he tried to gain acceptance by Stefan George and his circle. He engaged in translations and poetic endeavours in early 1902, while adopting a l'art-pour-l'art attitude which was modelled on Oscar Wilde. To maintain an extravagant lifestyle, he defrauded his study companion from Bonn, Herman Kilian, of the enormous sum of 10,000 Marks, and eloped with the wife of his architect friend August Endell to Palermo, where he continued translating decadent literature for the Insel and Bruns publishers. From May, 1903 to June, 1904 he was jailed for fraud in Bonn, during which period he consolidated his career as a professional translator. For about two years after his prison term he lived with Else Endell, to whom he referred as his wife and whom he credited with the translations of some Flaubert correspondence, first in Switzerland, then in Northern France, and finally in Berlin. In September 1909 he disappeared from the German scene by means of a staged suicide. Joined by Else "Greve"[11] in Kentucky on a small farm, he left her abruptly in 1911 or 1912. She went on to Cincinnati and New York, where she became as famous for her eccentric conduct as for her artistic endeavours under the name of Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. He made his way to Manitoba where he assumed Grove's well-documented identity in December 1912.
Grove first taught in the German-speaking district of Haskett in southern Manitoba. He married his fellow-teacher Catherine Wiens in August 1914, on which occasion he claimed to be a forty-year old widower (he was 33). The couple taught in various Manitoba schools until they moved first to Ottawa in 1929, where Grove joined Graphic Publishers until the firm went bankrupt in 1931, then to the Simcoe estate where Grove died in 1948. His last years were darkened by failing health after he had suffered a crippling stroke in 1944. He had earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Manitoba in 1922, and he started his prolific literary career the same year with the publication of Over Prairie Trails. During much of 1928, he went from coast to coast on several extensive lecture tours, and he received several awards and honorary degrees during the 1930s and 1940s.
A description of the sources The sources of the 122 poems included in the present edition are described in more detail below. The chronological arrangement adopted as an organizing principle for the text is reversed for the description of the source materials: Grove's English poetry, being by far the most substantial source, is addressed first; Grove's six German poems are second, and make the pivotal transition to Greve's German poetry which will be presented last. The following synopsis provides an orientation to the sources of these three distinct sections:
Grove's English poetry from the Grove Collection consists of:
- Poems: In Memoriam (IM: 63 poems (+1); Box 18, Fd. 11-14)
- IM related: 2 poems (1 concluding IM; SC: Box 11, Fd. 15)
- Notebook (NB: 35 poems; 4 not in IM; Box 18, Fd. 10)
- Notebook (NBLL: 4 poems on sheets, all in IM; Box 18, Fd. 10)
- IM related: 24 poems in Canadian Forum, 1929-1932 (CF, FD)
- IM related: 18 poems in Selections (S: Box 18, Fd. 23)
- IM related: 5 poems in Grove's correspondence (Letters, 1976)
- Miscellaneous Poems (MP: 11 poems; Box 18, Fd.24)
Grove's German manuscript poems consist of two clusters:
- 3 mss. poems in Miscellaneous Poems (MP: Box 18, Fd. 24)
- 3 mss. poems in Spettigue Collection (SC: Box 14, Fd. 15)
Greve's poetry consists of the following groups:
- Wolfskehl correpondence (2 poems, 1902; 1 unique)
- Wanderungen (23 poems published privately in 1902)
- Stefan George Archiv (7 manuscript poems, 1902)
- Fanny Essler poems (7 published poems, 1904/1905)
- Miscellaneous (3 published poems in journals, 1904-1907)
The sources of Grove's English poetry
The University of Manitoba acquired the major part of Grove's papers during 1962-1964 from Catherine Grove. The Register of the Frederick Philip Grove Collection (1979) provides a detailed, if at times inaccurate account of the contents placed in 23 boxes. Grove's poetry represented in this edition stems almost exclusively from these archives. External to it are five poems from the Spettigue Collection, three of which are related to Grove's German poetry. Two belong to the single most important group of Grove's English poetry, namely the typescript collection Poems: In Memoriam Phyllis May Grove (63 poems (+1), referred to as IM 1-[32]). In all, there are seventy-five English poems (including the sonnet, IM 15/28, st.7-10, published in Canadian Forum as FD XVI).
The central In Memoriam collection forms the near-comprehensive basis for Grove's English poetry. Closely related to it are the following secondary sources:
- 39 poems in the Notebook (Box 18, Fd. 10), 35 of which are the manuscript basis for roughly half of the In Memoriam collection, where they are faithfully reflected in typescript. These thirty-five In Memoriam poems include four insertions on loose leaves found in the Notebook. This means, that only four poems within the linear sequence of the Notebook proper are unique in Grove's poetry.
- 24 poems were published in four monthly issues of Canadian Forum between March, 1929 and April, 1932. All are present in the In Memoriam collection
. - 18 poems from the In Memoriam collection are also in Selections (Box 18, Fd. 23)
- only one of 11 poems in Miscellaneous Poems (Box 18, Fd. 24) is included in the In Memoriam collection. Three of them are untitled manuscripts in German
- 5 poems from the In Memoriam collection are mentioned or cited in Grove's correspondence (Letters, 1976).
Poems stemming from any of these related sources have not been repeated in the body of the edition. Major variations are addressed in the detailed description below, and are also reported in the footnotes pertaining to their respective IM counterparts. Since the situation of parallel sources can be very confusing at times, it is useful to provide the following tabular overview. It lists Grove's English poems centrally in IM order, the manuscript sources in the Notebook (NB) to the left, and related published (Canadian Forum, CF) or unpublished (Selections, S; Miscellaneous Poems, MP) variations in the right columns. Five references to IM poems in Grove's correspondence (Letters, 1976) are also listed, since they allow us to date the composition of some poems at least.
NB Title IM CF S MP Corr Thoughts 7 Preface 1 FD 21 The Gods 2 FD 3 1 Science 3 CF 1 10/28 30 Rebel's Conf. 4 After the Blow 5 FD 4 2 10/28 Prescience 6 3 Questions 7 4 9 Expression 8 5 ll. 1 Spectral Past 9 FD 1 3/29 1 The Voice 10 2 The Procession 11 ll. 4 Man/Universe 12 The Palinode 13 CF 3 21 Sacred Death 14 6 11/28 The Dirge "Beauty was..." 15/ 1 "The blow fell..." 15/ 2 FD 2 "This home..." 15/ 3 "So this is..." 15/ 4 FD 5 "They tell us..." 15/ 5 FD 6 "When infants..." 15/ 6 "How can they..." 15/ 7 FD 7 "We go about..." 15/ 8 "And do you..." 15/ 9 "How much..." 15/10 FD 8 "There is no..." 15/11 "They come..." 15/12 8 "No! Never..." 15/13 3 "You look at ..." 15/14 7 5 "She lives in..." 15/15 6 "Oh my dear..." 15/16 11 " Tulips, scillas..." 15/17 FD 9 "I sometimes..." 15/18 FD10 15 "I grow a..." 15/19 FD11 8 4 "Why should..." 15/20 12 "No country..." 15/21 "We cannot..." 15/22 "Yes, as I..." 15/23 FD12 32 "I wish I had..." 15/24 FD13 "In life thou..." 15/25 23 "Faith, so they..." 15/26 FD14 "My child, if..." 15/27 34 "What will..." 15/28 FD15+16 11/28 33 "Who would..." 15/29 31 "No, do not..." 15/30 FD17 ll. 2 "I know a..." 15/31 ll. 3 "She who has..." 15/32 Night Thoughts 15/33 MP10 Landscapes 24 At Sea 16 9 19 Embattled Skies 17 20 Nights in... 18 26 Dejection 19 10 17 The Dunes 20 FD18 11 27 The Sluice 21 12 Dawn 22 Fall 23 FD19 13 Indian Summer 24 CD2/FD20 10 First Frost 25 14 28 First Snow 26 14 Oppression 27 15 13 The Pool 28 16 + SC,"VI." Legend/Mars... The Eagles 29 18 Legend/Mars 30 17 22 Ahasuerus 31 18 - Dream Vision - SC |
When all sources are checked against the pivotal In Memoriam collection, there are ten unique poems, four stemming from the manuscripts in Notebook, and six from the eleven loose-leaf typescripts in the Miscellaneous Poems folder. Note that two of the latter are translations of Grove's German poems designated as MP 1 and MP 2, and are presented in that context in their versions 8b and 9a; that one of the Notebook manuscripts exists as typescript MP 11 as well, and that only MP 10, Night Thoughts, corresponds to any known poem in the In Memoriam collection, namely the last of the untitled Dirge poems (IM 15/33):
NB Title IM MP 29 Legend/Survival 11 35 Konrad,the Builder 16 "Discordant strains...." 25 Dejection(not IM 19!)
MP 4 You+ I 5 Retrospection 6 TheSonnet 7 Night 8a ArcticWoods 9b TheDying Year [NightThoughts] 15/33 10 |
More than half of the IM poems (35 of 63) are present as manuscripts in the Notebook. A comparison of IM and NB poems reveals that the second part of the 33 Dirge poems (IM 15/1-33) is well represented, while the first twelve are lacking. Most of these later Dirge poems in the Notebook are then certainly not the earliest expressions in reaction to Phyllis May's death on July 20, 1927 which prompted the very conception of the In Memoriam cycle. A manuscript source similar to the Notebook and containing the missing, earlier poems in the Dirge cycle may either be lost, or still in private hands. A reference to Leonard Grove's "extensive collection of original manuscripts, both published and unpublished" in the programme of the Grove Colloquium in Simcoe, 1977, suggests that a substantial portion of source material is still inaccessible today. Therefore, only incomplete observations of the genesis of Grove's poetry can be made at present.
As most Notebook manuscripts, the other two major sources revolve around the In Memoriam cycle: the 18 poems chosen by Grove for his Selections, and all 24 published poems in Canadian Forum between 1929 and 1932 correspond without exception to In Memoriam counterparts.
In contrast, there are four Notebook entries which are not reflected in the In Memoriam typescript, and seven of the eight English poems in Miscellaneous Poems are unique; only MP 10, Night Thoughts, is identical with the untitled poem concluding The Dirge cycle (IM 15/33).
Uniqueness in the present context is usually defined as "not present in the In Memoriam collection". Thus, A Dream Vision from the Spettigue Collection does not exist anywhere in the Grove archives, but is clearly related to the In Memoriam collection; it has therefore been added to its IM sequence as IM 32. The Legend of the Great Survival, however, which exists both as (untitled) manuscript NB 29 and as typescript MP 11 is nevertheless considered "unique", since it is unrelated to the IM collection. An exception is From the Dirge no. 16: although it is an integral part of The Dirge (IM 15/28, st. 7-10), it is "unique" because of its special status as an independently published sonnet in Canadian Forum.
Poems: In Memoriam Phyllis May Grove (63+1 poems; B18, Fd.1-14)
This central source of Grove's poetry exists in neatly typed form in the Grove archives.[15] The collection contains 63 poems on 92 numbered leaves, and it is fairly symmetrically structured in four parts, not unlike Greve's collection Wanderungen. The initial section is entitled Thoughts, and includes fourteen titled, lyrical poems (IM 1-14). The central part, The Dirge, contains 33 untitled poems which revolve around the theme of his daughter's death, or death in general (IM 15/1-15/33). Landscapes includes thirteen impressionistic, titled poems (IM 16-28), and the final section Legend of the Planet Mars and Other Narratives contains three more or less narrative, titled poems (IM 29-31). The epic poem Man Within the Universe (IM 12; 20x4) in the Thoughts section would have been more aptly placed within this final section, while the confessional character of The Eagles and Ahasuerus has a strong affinity with The Rebel's Confession and some other poems in Thoughts. All poems except the 33 Dirge items have titles. The very first IM poem is called Preface. There is no concluding poem in the typescript, but A Dream Vision from the Spettigue Collection has been placed as a postscript here, and is referred to as IM 32.
Poems: In Memoriam Phyllis May Grove can be considered as an edition ready for publication, and it is therefore much like an Ausgabe letzter Hand in the sense that Grove himself organized the material, made very few, last minute manuscript corrections, and otherwise seems to have approved of the overall arrangement and presentation. Although none are extant, it is likely that several drafts preceded the tidy IM typescript. There is no indication when its preparation was completed, but some circumstantial evidence supports the assumption that this was accomplished not long before a selection of twenty-one poems appeared as "From the Dirge" in Canadian Forum in April, 1932.[16]
The entire In Memoriam collection has been carefully reproduced from the typescript in the present edition. As far as possible, the physical aspects of the lay-out have been respected. Wherever indicated, notes refer to particularities in other versions or to variant titles in Grove's manuscript Notebook, the poems published in Canadian Forum between 1929 and 1932, those chosen for Grove's unpublished typescript Selections, or to any combination of the possibilities above.
The subtitle of the collection as well as the very design to devote a cycle of old and new poetry to his daughter Phyllis May Grove were occasioned by her sudden death on July, 1927.[17] Many of the Dirge poems are a direct expression of Grove's grief over this devastating loss. In the earliest known correspondence after the blow, Grove states in a seemingly controlled, brief note to Watson Kirkconnell that he and his wife "have been homeless" since the terrible shock, that the matters related to his daughter's death seem "to have a past link",[19] and that her parents' life seems "extinct". He also cites Horace's Odes I, 18 in Latin to the effect: "What limit could there be to the grief for one so dear."[20] One of Grove's unpublished short stories[21] is a barely veiled revenge fantasy in which he gets even with an incompetent doctor whom he holds responsible for a senseless death which, in his opinion, could have easily been avoided.
Since Grove was always particularly proud of his classical education, the choice of the Latin subtitle may have been inspired by the classical tradition of elegies.[22] But then his knowledge of literature in general was immense, and he could have had more modern sources in mind as well. For instance, Grove borrowed the line "Nought we know dies" for the motto of the final poem in the Dirge cycle (IM 15/33)[23] from Shelley's famous elegy on the death of Keats (1821), Adonais. Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) devoted 131 sonnet-like poems to the memory of his friend Arthur Hallam and is a possible source of inspiration. In relation to his "Dekadenzbuch",[25] Greve compared Tennyson with Browning whom he translated along with numerous other Victorian authors in 1902, and he was probably also aware of Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis. Grove referred to Tennyson twice, though hardly in appreciative terms, in letters to Watson Kirkconnell in late 1926 and early 1927 -- a time preceding his daughter's death by half a year, but also a time of increased preoccupation with his own poetry. German elegies were written by Klopstock, Goethe, Hölderlin, Mörike, and Rilke. As mentioned below in the context of the Palinode (IM 13, CF 3), there is a possible, veiled link to the German baroque poet Hofmannswaldau whom Greve endeavoured to revive in 1907 and who had compiled a collection of Grabschriften, or dirges. Grove named the central cycle of his collection The Dirge, and a substantial selection from the In Memoriam collection in Canadian Forum was entitled "From the Dirge".
The time of composition of the poems represented in the In Memoriam complex cannot be determined with certainty, but their inspirational impulses appear to range from 1909 (and earlier times!) to 1932. Only one of the fourteen poems in the initial section Thoughts (IM 1-14) specifies a time or place: The Sacred Death (IM 14) is dated 1924, and has a reference to the death of "P. McI". While none of the Dirge poems (IM 15/1-33) has dates, several address the traumatic loss Grove suffered in July, 1927 in often moving imagery. In the section following The Dirge (Landscapes, IM 16-28), six of thirteen poems include dates or dedications at the bottom of the page: At Sea, Nova Scotia, 1909 (IM 16), Embattled Skies and Night in the Hills, both 1924 (IM 17-18), Dejection, 1914 (IM 19), The Sluice, 1923 (IM 21), and Dawn, 1922 (IM 22). In the fourth and final section of the collection, only the Legend of the Planet Mars (IM 30) is dated 1915.[30] Note that all of these explicit dates precede the death of Phyllis May Grove, that a large number of the poems in the Dirge are not directly related to this loss, and that these, as most other poems, simply fail to provide any clue whatsoever about the probable time of either inspiration or composition.
For further indications as to when Grove was working on or preoccupied with his major poetry collection, a description of the other three closely related sources (NB, CF/FD, and S) is necessary. This scrutiny, supported by a few revealing reflections of poetry in Grove's correspondence, will then allow us to make some very tentative remarks about a possible genesis and filiation.
Poems from the Spettigue Collection
This small, but important cluster includes three German manuscript poems which are described below in the context of Grove's German poetry. There is also a typescript of two English poems related to the In Memoriam collection. "A Dream Vision", which is lacking from the IM typescript in the Grove Archives, has this explanatory manuscript note written alongside:
"One night, shortly after the little girl's death, when for many nights the writer had had no sleep because he was so profoundly disquieted by the mysteries of life and death which surround us on all sides, he at last sank away into some sort of restless rest, and his eyelids closed. But they had hardly done so when a vision harried his absent mind; and shortly he awoke in a sweat. He rose, lighted a lamp, and went down into his study where he tried briefly to record what he had seen."[31]
It appears to have been meant as either introduction or conclusion to the entire In Memoriam cycle, or to Dirge poems proper (IM 15/1-33). However, since indications about Grove's intentions are lacking, and its function and place within the In Memoriam complex remains uncertain, it has been appended to the collection as IM [32]. Attached to "A Dream Vision" is an untitled poem marked with the Roman numeral VI which indicates that this poem was targeted for a selection or publication. Through the First-line index provided in the appendices of this edition, it was identified as The Pool (IM 28) which is also no. 16 of Selections, and no. 13 in the Notebook.
The Notebook (35 + 4 poems, Box 18, Fd. 10)
Grove's Notebook is a black ledger with unpaginated lined paper which cover 49 leaves. A small white label on the front cover states in three lines: Poems / F. P. G. / Address "Books". In straightforward fashion, and for the most part also in amazingly tidy handwriting, the Notebook contains 35 unnumbered poems which are referred to here as NB 1-35 for convenience. There are also three loose sheets with four additional poems (NBLL 1-4), and an inserted page with a variant beginning of Konrad The Builder (NB 35). All 39 NB poems are listed in two tables in the appendices of this edition, once in NB order, and then again in IM order. This facilitates a detailed comparison, some aspects of which are highlighted below.
With rare exceptions, the Notebook poems are untitled and undated. Some have metrical notations in the margin. Frequently, a title (or, for The Dirge poems, a Roman numeral) is pencilled in the lower corner of the page, indicating the place assigned in the In Memoriam collection.
On several occasions, the situation in the Notebook becomes extremely complicated. This is notably the case towards the end of the ledger where NB 26 (IM 19) is pasted over a heavily corrected version of NB 27 (IM 21), or where NB 32 (IM 15/24) is hidden under NB 31 (IM 15/30). Especially confusing is the situation concerning NB 33 (IM 15/29) which covers the first four of the six stanzas forming NB 34 (IM 15/28).[33] All these instances are described in notes pertaining to the respective IM poems in the corpus of the edition.
The inside of the front cover contains the beginning of an essay on realism which Grove may have presented to the Canadian Authors' Association in mid-1925.[34] With other fragments of criticism on books, fiction,[35] and Thomas Hardy,[36] this essay is continued from the back of the ledger. A good part of the final epic poem Konrad (NB 35)[37] is therefore facing tightly written, but inverted manuscript prose. Presumably, Grove started using the notebook from the back after filling the regular page sequence with poems which must therefore be of earlier composition.
Critical essays on fiction, realism and Hardy were published between 1929 (It Needs To Be Said) and 1932/33 (in University of Toronto Quarterly). An article in Grove's Archives on the novel has the word "printed" written on the typescript, and is likely to belong to the same period.[38]
Grove's preoccupation with Hardy at this time is of great relevance to his poetry.[39] Grove's personal copy of Hardy's poetry (1926) is heavily annotated, and a direct influence can safely be assumed. Several poems in the table of contents have Grove's remark "Heinesque!" written next to them, pointing to further intertextual discourses in Grove's poetic creativity. Carleton Stanley had astutely noted that Grove's poems reminded him of Heine.
The presence of several grief poems in the beginning of the Notebook[41] suggests that they were inspired by his daughter's death on July, 1927. While there is no certainty in these matters, most of the fifteen Dirge poems in the Notebook were likely created not too long after this devastating event, whereas the majority of the Thoughts and Landscapes poems represent earlier, and in part very early creations. All of the epic poems seem to belong to earlier strata of composition as well.
It is particularly interesting to note that the fifteen Dirge poems in the Notebook correspond to the second half of the 33 poems of this cycle within a cycle: the first twelve are lacking a manuscript equivalent altogether, the ten and twenty ranges are relatively well represented, while IM 15/31-32 are inserted only in loose-leaf form, and the concluding Dirge poem IM 15/33 (with the motto "Nought we know dies..." taken from Shelley's Adonais) is identical to Night Thoughts in Miscellaneous Poems (MP 10), all eleven of which are definitely early compositions.
Given that the Notebook contains about half of the IM typescript (35 of 63), one wonders again about a similar manuscript source containing the remainder, namely the eighteen missing Dirge poems and ten poems from other sections of the In Memoriam collection.[43]
Four of the 39 NB poems[44] are not represented in the Poems: In Memoriam collection. Two of these are the lyrical poems "Discordant strains..." (NB16) and Dejection (NB 25), both of which Grove had crossed out and marked with the note "rejected". The other two poems are the narrative poems NB 29 and NB 35. Konrad the Builder (NB 35) is a unique fragment in the Notebook. The Legend of the Great Survival (NB 29) also exists in typescript in Miscellaneous Poems (MP 11). These four poems are included here in the section of Unique Poems. The epic poems are placed in continuation of the last section of the In Memoriam cycle, which contains similar "narratives".
For Konrad, the transparent intertextual reference to Goethe's Faust -- Konrad is yet another of Grove's Promethean or "Faustian" self-representations, and apart from the vague medieval setting, the presence of a blond and blue-eyed Margaret (Gretchen) makes the parallel more than obvious -- have been confirmed beyond any doubt: Grove's library contains two editions of this text. One is published by Kröner in Germany [ca. 1918], and contains no annotations. The other is an American edition in which Grove reacted spontaneously to the editor's English notes about the German text -- often negatively ("what nonsense!", etc.), but invariably displaying an intimate knowledge of the text.
Overall, the distribution of the NB poems in relation to the In Memoriam cycle is as follows: 35 of the 39 NB poems are included in the IM collection; 8 of 14 are present in Thoughts; 15 of 33 in The Dirge; 10 of 13 in Landscapes; and 2 of 3 in the Legends.
Various corrections in the Notebook reveal furthermore that the In Memoriam versions reflect the manuscript texts exactly, which indicates that they were carefully typed directly from the ledger. Most discrepancies are minor, and affect mainly punctuation. The single most significant lexical variation occurs in The Preface (NB 7, IM 1) where the typed version replaces manuscript "Life" with "God" in the closing line.
Noteworthy are the two following surprises of a different kind: next to NB 31 (IM 15/30), there are eleven monograms combining Grove's, Catherine's and Phyllis May's initials. Some look similar to the monogram appearing in 1946 on the cover of In Search of Myself. Scribbled in the margin of NB 32 (IM 15/24) which is covered with NB 31 (IM 15/30) and the monograms, one finds the intriguing note "Jane Atkinson, by Andrew R. Rutherford". Rutherford is the alleged maiden name of Grove's mother, and a "great-uncle" of this name also occurs in In Search of Myself and Grove's conversations.[46] Jane Atkinson is the fragment of an unpublished novel, which Grove apparently intended to publish under the Rutherford pseudonym. He had proposed it once before to McClelland & Stewart in 1919 for his first book publication Over Prairie Trails (1922).[48] The maternal grandfather of Greve's close friend Kilian was the famous Scottish lawyer Lord Andrew Rutherford Clark. Pacey and his assistant Mahanti found Kilian's daughter in 1973 in Bonn: her first name was Jane, and it is likely that she was named after Kilian's mother.
As mentioned before, nearly half (28 of 63) of the IM poems are lacking in the Notebook, and further manuscript sources must be considered lost at this time. From the proportions outlined, it follows that missing manuscripts largely affect the first two sections of the cycle, namely Thoughts (6 of 14) and The Dirge (18 of 33), and that they are probably of earlier composition than those in the Notebook which contains most of the poems in the last two sections Landscapes and Legends.
The following two sources are closely related to the In Memoriam collection in the sense that all twenty-four poems published in Canadian Forum between 1929-1932 and the eighteen poems assembled in Selections at an unspecified point in time were obviously chosen from this pivotal source of Grove's poetry. Only nine of the 24 Canadian Forum poems, but thirteen of the 18 poems in Selections can be correlated to manuscripts in the Notebook.
Canadian Forum, 1929-1932 (24 poems)
In March 1929, Grove published his first poem Science (IM 3) in Canadian Forum.[50] It was followed in November of the same year by Indian Summer (IM 24), and in September, 1930 by The Palinode (IM 13). None of these poems is present in the Notebook, whereas nine of the following poems are: in April 1932, the journal printed twenty-one numbered poems under the collective title From the Dirge.[53] These 24 poems represent the entire corpus of Grove's poetry publications known to date, and they account for about one third of the 75 English poems in this edition.
Given the importance Grove attributed to the three poems he chose for individual publication in Canadian Forum in 1929 and 1930, a closer description seems indicated.
Science from the Thoughts section has twelve quatrains in which the theme of knowledge and ignorance is explored. Man's ignorance is described through a hyperbolic variation of the Platonic cave allegory: not only does man fruitlessly grope in the dark, he is represented as nothing but "a sightless eft".[54] In an ontological perspective, the conflict between personal ambitions and real life, which is dominant theme in Grove's German poems, prevails in this poem again. The solution proposed to alleviate a dismal condition is also the same for the personal and the universal setting: it is "to dream a world not lost in utter night".[55] In spite of the Platonic model, this poem conveys a sense of typical Nietzschean nihilism, and the concept of dreaming up a world is strongly reminiscent of Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; English, The World as Will and Idea).
Five months before its publication, Grove had presented Science to the Victoria Branch of the Canadian Authors' Association in October 1928, and the local Daily Times had reported two days later about his "inspired verse, unusual examples of which he read to an appreciative audience."[56]
Indian Summer (IM 24) is in the Landscapes section which follows the Dirge poems. It combines the lyrical description of a fall day with reflections about the narrator's life season. The day is full of peaceful melancholy, as is Grove's mood. Like Moses, he reflects on life and death, and he expresses sadness about the loss of his daughter and the void it has left in his life.
The role of Nietzschean prophet and seer which Grove often adopted for himself[57] is tempered here by a tragic personal experience. One cannot help comparing this poem with Grove's and Greve's Erster Sturm where the fall theme is cast in as an allegorical, tempestuous force of nature, and life is represented as condensed, dynamic action -- what a contrast with the static, contemplative attitude in the fall poem by the mature author! Grove must have been particularly fond of this poem, since only a year and a half later, he published it again as no. XX of From the Dirge. It is, however, absent from both the Notebook and Selections.
The Palinode (IM 13) from the Thoughts section demonstrates Grove's extensive knowledge of poetic forms: in part one, seven stanzas reflect on life, man, and the impossibility of knowledge; they are mirrored by the seven stanzas of part two, where life's purpose and pattern are viewed less negatively since the eternal realm of the soul can at times be known intuitively. The printing enhances visually the symmetry by placing both parts next to each other.[59] This effect is lost in the linear arrangement of the typescript. There, part two refers to the Greek poet Stesichoros who is believed to have written the first palinode on Helena. As mentioned earlier, both Greve and Grove took great pride in their classical, philological education.
A palinode is an ode followed by a counter-ode, and it was a model frequently used in Baroque literature. The common theme was, as in Grove's poem, praise and contempt of the world. It is not without relevance to note that in 1907 Greve edited poetry by Hofmannswaldau (1617-1679) who, incidentally, also published Grabschriften (1663), or funeral lamentations -- in other words, dirges.
The situation of From the Dirge (FD) is structurally quite complex. To say the least, the title is misleading, since one third of the 21 poems do not belong to The Dirge cycle (IM 15/1-33) of the In Memoriam collection. The IM order listing of the Canadian Forum poems in the appendices reveals that 4 are from Thoughts, 14 from The Dirge, and 3 from Landscapes. The arrangement of these poems as shown in the CF order listing suggests, however, that the Dirge group is particularly well represented: FD 2, 5-17 appear like a tidy selection from the IM 15/1-33 sequence.[60]
Poems chosen from the sections framing the Dirge cycle are, overall, not much less regular: FD 1, 3-4 correspond to the Thoughts poems The Spectral Past (IM 9), The Gods (IM 2), and After the Blow (IM 5) -- only the first poem is curiously unlike the IM order. Its manuscript equivalent is one of the loose leaves in the Notebook. Written on the verso of an advertisement sent out by Graphic Publishers to potential reviewers of A Search for America, late 1927 or so could be the date of its composition.[61] FD 18-20 follow the IM order of Landscapes, (IM 20, 23-24) perfectly. However, the final From the Dirge poem (FD 21) is strikingly out of order; it actually corresponds to the initial poem of the entire In Memoriam collection, The Preface (IM 1) from Thoughts.
So, while 19 of the 21 poems From the Dirge adhere closely to the sequence of the master collection, two -- both from the initial Thoughts section -- do not. Since they affect the opening and the closing of the published selection, this seemingly irregularity appears as a deliberate attempt at providing an appropriate frame.
The conclusions drawn earlier from the Notebook evidence, namely that the first half of the In Memoriam collection is more fluctuating and less documented with extant manuscript sources than the second half, seems confirmed by the fact that the nine poems From the Dirge present in the Notebook cluster around the higher numbered entries there -- given the linear nature of entries in this ledger, this indicates later rather than earlier composition. Referring to the In Memoriam order of the FD poems, one finds first NB 7, NB loose leaf 1 (both from Thoughts, IM 1 and 9), then NB 11, 15 (both from The Dirge, IM 15/17 and 15/19) followed by NB 32, 23, 34, 31 (IM 15/24, 26, 28, 30), and finally NB 17 from Landscapes (IM 20).
Almost all From the Dirge poems deviate little from the IM typescript other than in punctuation. In four noteworthy instances, a stanza present in the IM collection is missing in the corresponding publication: FD 1 lacks the last stanza of The Spectral Past (IM 9); FD 5 omits stanza 2 of The Dirge IV (IM 15/4), FD 12 lacks the second stanza of IM 15/23, and FD 17 omits the final stanza of IM 15/30. FD 15 has changed "firm flesh" in IM 15/28, st.1-6 and NB 34 to "soft flesh" in the first quatrain which is a clear lexical improvement. FD 19 has corrected "October blasts" (IM 23, st.1) into more appropriate "November blasts".
An interesting and complex situation arises from FD 15 and 16 (both IM 15/28): FD 15 repeats the six manuscript stanzas of NB 34 which is one of the last, heavily corrected entries preceding the lengthy Konrad fragment. The first four stanzas are covered with "Who would have told me..." (NB 33, IM 15/29), stanza five peaks out from underneath this glued-on addition, and stanza six follows on the verso of the ledger page. FD 16 appears to be a unique poem at first sight. However, the corresponding Dirge poem in the In Memoriam typescript (IM 15/28) has 8 stanzas of 4, and 2 stanzas of 3 lines. This means that IM 15/28 was published as two poems, namely FD 15 and an independent sonnet, FD 16. Given this special status, FD 16 has been included in this edition as a unique poem on p. 178.
IM 15/28, st. 1-6 was unfinished in November, 1928 when Grove sent it to Watson Kirkconnell. Stanzas 1, 4-6 of what he called "an old poem" were ready then, the second and third he "couldn't get together" at the time.[63] The corresponding Notebook entry (NB 34), however, shows these two quatrains in place which indicates that Grove managed to find a satisfactory form for them after he wrote that letter; they were later published as FD 15 in April, 1932. Where the sonnet FD 16 stems from in either its IM 15/28, st. 7-10 or its FD sonnet manifestation remains a complete mystery. In fact, the theme and atmosphere of the two FD poems are so incompatible that a mistake in the spacing and numbering on pages 56-57 of the IM typescript must be considered a likely conjecture.
Selections (18 poems, Box 18, Fd. 23)
Grove chose eighteen poems from the In Memoriam cycle for another collection which he probably meant to publish like the twenty-one poems in From the Dirge. Whether this plan was made before or after the Canadian Forum publication in 1932 is unclear, but in either case, the Selections appear to be intended as a representative sampler of Grove's comprehensive In Memoriam collection, and they have clearly complementary character: Grove's choice carefully excludes most of the Dirge poems, whereas the published selection draws heavily on them. The other In Memoriam sections are proportionally better represented. However, while the respective parts chosen for both selections seem carefully balanced and mutually exclusive, no less than five poems are duplicated. This could indicate that Selections represents an earlier attempt at publication which was aborted in favour of the structurally more accomplished From the Dirge complex.
The arrangement in Selections follows the order of the IM collection in all respects which strongly suggests that the selected poems were taken from the In Memoriam typescipt as we know it in a linear fashion, and without the intent to create a coherent, thematic subgroup as evident in From the Dirge. There is an overall title, "Selections from Poems / by Frederick Philip Grove", and partial titles refer to the four sections known from the In Memoriam collection. From Book I: Thoughts and Images includes six of the fourteen poems in the initial IM group.[65] From Book II: The Dirge represents only two of the thirty-three Dirge poems, namely IM 15/14 and 15/19.[66] From Book III: Landscapes includes eight of the thirteen poems in the corresponding IM section,[67] and From Book IV repeats The Legend of the Planet Mars (IM 30), and Ahasuerus (IM 31), omitting significantly The Eagles (IM 29) from the final IM group. This poem which has confessional character and also resembles Greve's and Grove's German poetry with its Promethean outlook, as does "the wanderer" in Ahasuerus, exists solely in the IM typescript.
There is little variation in these poems in comparison to their respective counterparts in In Memoriam, but dates locations are expanded in Selections in the following five cases:
The Sacred Death (S 6) spells out the initials "P.McI." in IM 14 as "Death of Peter McIlvride"; the date 1924 is the same.
For Dejection (S 10), the date is 1913, not 1914 as in IM 19, and the location "Pembina Mountains" is added. This difference of one year has important implications for the possible biographical inspiration: in 1913, the depressed feelings reflected in Dejection suggest reminiscences of Grove's first year in Canada, and are therefore unrelated to his involvement with Catherine Wiens. The tone of his first letters to her in June 1914 is still fairly distant, although they were married on the 2nd of August. In 1913, on the other hand, Grove had ample reason to feel guilty and depressed about having abandoned about a year before, and in rather cowardly fashion, his long-term "wife" Else in Kentucky.
The Sluice (S 12) is dated 1923 as is IM 21, but adds the geographical location "At the sluice of the Little Saskatchewan". In the Notebook version (NB 27), the title is "Past & Future", but The Sluice is pencilled in the bottom corner.
At Sea (S 9) repeats the earliest of all acknowledged dates and the location "Nova Scotia, 1909", just as in IM 16. Since Greve disappeared from Germany in September of that year, and came to North America by boat "via Canada",[70] this poem is an extremely valuable biographical confirmation for the Greve/Grove identity.
Fall (IM 23) is expanded to Fall in Manitoba in S 13. The untitled From the Dirge version has corrected "October blasts" to "November blasts" which can be considered a realistic precision over the versions in In Memoriam and Selections; this change might therefore be used as an argument for the posteriority of the Canadian Forum poems in relation to Selections, the IM typescript being their common root.
Early poems from IM's initial part Thoughts which are lacking in the Notebook (namely IM 2, 5-7) are present here as S 1-4. That the remaining fourteen selections (S 5-18) are all represented in the Notebook[72] points once again to missing, earlier manuscripts.
An intriguing detail in the Selections is the typed Roman numeral VII on Questions Reasked (S 4). The title was added in pencil beside it. This poem is no. 7 in the In Memoriam cycle, and it is absent in the Notebook. With near-certainty, Goethe can be assumed as a direct source of inspiration: an American edition of Goethe's poetry in Grove's library is heavily annotated, and reveals that Grove was impressed by part three of Goethe's poem no. 112, "Gott, Gemüt und Welt" which reads:
"Wie? Wann? und Wo? -- Die Götter bleiben stumm
Du halte dich ans Weil und frage nicht: Warum?"
While the text is unmarked, Grove translated the interrogatives in line two of the poem in the notes section: "weil : whence / warum : whereto (wozu)".[74] The opening and closing lines of Questions Reasked are: "What are we? Whence? And whither are we bound?". An untitled poem carrying the Roman numeral VI is attached to A Dream Vision from the Spettigue Collection (IM 32). This poem, the The Pool, is no. 16 of Selections, and no. 28 of In Memoriam, and also exists in the Notebook (NB13). The version in the Spettigue Collection differs from IM 28 and NB 13 in several respects. Most notable is the shift from addressing his daughter directly in precious "thee" and "thy" forms to a third-person perspective with simpler "she" and "her" pronouns. Neither one of the two neatly typed poems, Questions Reasked (S 4) and The Pool (S 16/SC) was included in From the Dirge which collection contained seven numbered, untitled poems which do have titles in the In Memoriam collection.[76]
The enigmatic Roman numerals VII and VI[77] seem to suggest that Grove considered the publication of poetry in several unknown constellations possibly even before the Notebook entries were written, and long before the In Memoriam typescript was finalized. These two poems are thematically related in their romantic and idealistic reflections on the world, life and death: Plato is mentioned explicitly in the first, the image of the pool as a mirror of the soul is the topic of the second. Both are also strongly reminiscent of Grove's "Shelley poem", Night Thoughts, where death (and Phyllis May's death) is the theme, and in which "thee and "thy" pronouns are employed in both versions, MP 10 and IM 15/28. Most other poems in Miscellaneous Poems being clearly romantic[78] and neo-romantic[79] as well, and having collective titles like Poems of the Lake and Woods and Visions, one suspects that they are relatively old examples of Grove's "Gedankenlyrik", or philosophical poetry, and that they were prepared for publication around the same time.
The Pool and Night Thoughts do incorporate his personal experience of loss in mid-1927, but sometimes in the final stanza only, like an after-thought; they therefore may have been older poems which he reworked after his daughter's death precisely to adapt them to the nascent In Memoriam collection. The remainder of the poems in Selections is quite impersonal, and only Questions Reasked is included in IM Thoughts (S4/IM 7).
Although it is possible that both From the Dirge (1932) and Selections were assembled and typed directly from the Notebook and/or other assumed manuscript sources, this is a highly unlikely conjecture: they are clearly "selected" from the most comprehensive typescript corpus,[80] they both repeat about one third of this authoritative collection, and they carefully emphasize different sections of it. From the Dirge uses almost half of the 33 Dirge poems, Selections only two. In contrast, From the Dirge includes only four of the 14 Thoughts poems, three of the 13 Landscape poems, and none of the "legends", while Selections incorporates the relatively high proportion of six and eight poems respectively, and includes furthermore two of three poems from Legends. Also, with the exception of the initial and final poems, the order of the In Memoriam poems is closely adhered to in From the Dirge in 1932. The three poems which may seem somewhat erratically placed in this perspective[82] appear to be deliberately transferred in the interest of structure and thematic unity. The poems in Selections follow the In Memoriam sequence without a single exception, like a mirror-reflection.
Reflections of Grove's poetry in his correspondence
Desmond Pacey's masterly edition of Grove's correspondence allows one some glimpses into the genesis of five poems.
The first evidence of Grove's poetry in the correspondence is reflected in a letter to his wife on October 6, 1928. Grove is on his second lecture tour to western Canada,[83] and he reports that in a reading to the local chapter of the Canadian Authors' Association in Victoria he "recited 'Science' from my poems. They did not know, of course, what to make of it." To judge from an account in the Victoria Daily Times two days after this event, Grove had indeed managed to shock the audience; he also had announced the impending publication of his poetry: "A collection of his inspired verse, unusual examples of which he read to an appreciative audience, will appear in print in 1930."[85] Science (IM 3) is Grove's first known published poem. Five months after the public presentation in Victoria, it appeared in Canadian Forum in March, 1929. It is the third poem of In Memoriam, and it is absent from the Notebook.
Instead of an address, Grove quotes the opening line of After the Blow (IM 5)[86] in the next letter to his wife from Victoria, on October 7, 1928: "And thus the days go by, a long, long line...".[87] Again, this poem is lacking in the Notebook, but it is published more than three years later, in April, 1932, as FD 4; it is also present in Grove's Selections (S2).
Shortly after his return to Rapid City, on November 19, 1928, Grove includes The Sacred Death (IM 14) along with some stanzas of The Dirge XXVIII (IM 15/28) in a letter to Watson Kirkconnell. Grove's words at the close of this letter refer to both of these poems as if they were one: "I'll enclose an old poem. Please tell me what you think of it." The Sacred Death -- this title is used in the letter for Grove's "old poem" -- is also present in the Notebook (NB 21; the title is pencilled in the bottom corner), and in Selections (S 6) where the date, 1924, is the same as in the In Memoriam collection, but the dedication "Death of P.McI" is spelled out as "Death of Peter McIlvride".[89] Pacey specifies that he was a farmer in Rapid City who died on May 10, 1925 (not in 1924) of pneumonia "after four days of an illness which was thought to be a heavy cold..., and for which no one thought of seeking medical help until it was too late. His wife survived him by some forty years." A month earlier, Grove had written to his wife from Victoria: "Yesterday, by the way, a brother of the late Pete McIlvride called on me and told me a great deal of the antecedents of that death: also of the early married life of the R[apid] C[ity] McIlvrides. It's just as I had divined it." From these comments, one might conclude that Grove saw a close parallel between this farmer's and his daughter's death, the common element being the fatal negligence of family or hospital caretakers.
IM 15/28, already discussed in detail above in the context of the Canadian Forum publications, has a special significance in this letter as well. The "old poem" sent to Kirkconnell has eight quatrains of which the first four form The Sacred Death (IM 14). The other four do belong, although no such indication is given, to the Dirge XXVIII. After it's initial quatrain Grove wrote in parentheses: "Two stanzas which I cannot get together", and then continued with stanzas 4-6. IM 15/28 has ten stanzas in the In Memoriam typescript (8x4, 2x3) of which only the first six are represented in the Notebook (NB 34) and in From the Dirge XV (FD 15). As mentioned before, the missing four stanzas of IM 15/28 are published as an independent sonnet in From the Dirge (FD 16, April 1932).
For the genesis of this poem, this proves that in late 1928, Grove was still battling with stanzas 2-3; in other words, IM 15/28 was unfinished. Considering that these two troublesome stanzas are present in one of the latest entries in the Notebook points to their likely completion sometime in 1929. In April, 1932 they appeared in print in nearly identical form. This, of course, does not provide a conclusive answer to the question whether FD 15 was taken directly from the Notebook manuscript or copied from the In Memoriam typescript. However, the lexical and structural improvements manifest in the published version confirm our earlier impressions that the entire From the Dirge complex was selected from the comprehensive In Memoriam collection.[92]
In another letter to Watson Kirkconnell on March 24, 1929 Grove cites the last two lines of the second stanza of The Spectral Past (IM 9, 4x4): "...with power yet to thrill or to unnerve, And to evoke things felt or heard or seen."[93] This poem was also chosen as the opening to the selection of the twenty-one poems represented in From the Dirge where stanza four is omitted. In the Notebook, IM 9 only exists in loose-leaf form: it is written in three tentative versions on the back of a blurb designed by Graphic Publishers for potential reviewers of Grove's first autobiographical novel, A Search for America (published in October, 1927). This insertion may therefore be of earlier composition than other Notebook entries.
These references in Grove's correspondence during late 1928 and early 1929 confirm a heightened preoccupation with poetry around that time. They also determine the likely dates of composition for some later Notebook poems, although this has little bearing on the underlying, inspirational impulses; these are often unrelated to his daughter's tragic death in mid-1927, and can reflect the entire range of memories accumulated over two or three decades.
The presence of fifteen Dirge poems in the Notebook clearly suggests that the ledger was used to record reflections about this tragic event, but that earlier reactions related to this complex can safely be assumed. The Notebook thus appears like a sequel to another, entirely unknown manuscript source. While the later-ranging entries in the Notebook were proven to have been composed around 1928/1929, earlier ones were likely created from late 1927 onwards. Grove's first poem appeared in print in March, 1929, and one third of the In Memoriam typescript was published two years later in April, 1932. Sometime within these three years, the basic content and form of the In Memoriam typescript -- which reflects individual Notebook poems with great fidelity, but deviates entirely from its initial, strictly linear structure -- must have been finalized.
This was probably not done before the Groves settled in Simcoe in October, 1931. Both Selections and From the Dirge were then selected from the typescript, the former being merely a linear, representative anthology, the latter organized in a more artful complex centred around a unifying theme. It is possible that Grove gave up on Selections, since he placed five of its eighteen poems in From the Dirge.
Some biographical considerations seem to support the assumption that Grove was interrupted in his work on the poetry collection for at least two years. When, in October, 1929, he announced the publication of such a collection for the next year, he probably intended to devote time and effort to this project. But poetry being just one of the many literary expressions he pursued simultaneously and other circumstances arising as well, he came to neglect this particular task for quite some time. What was happening in his life during these years?
Grove had been working at a truly manic pace in the late twenties: A Search for America was published in 1927, he went on three coast-to-coast lecture tours in 1928 and early 1929, he published several critical articles between 1928-1929, Our Daily Bread appeared in October, 1928, and his next novel, The Yoke of Life, in 1930.
Besides these feverishly intense creative endeavours, several important changes occurred in Grove's life: the couple moved from Manitoba to Ottawa in late 1929, and for nearly two years, Grove became deeply involved with Graphic Publishers and a parallel venture called Ariston, before he settled down in Simcoe in October 1931. In the midst of this hectic time, on October 14, 1930, Leonard was born. It stands to reason that Grove could not have devoted special attention to his poetry projects until he was relatively free from several other, more pressing obligations. Therefore, late 1931 may have presented the earliest opportunity for him to return to his task and finalize the poetry cycle which he had conceived nearly five years earlier. In April, 1932 he was then able to publish a major part of it at last.
Some indications of older poetry have been detected and discussed within the context of Selections, and they have been linked to the poems described in the following source which is believed to contain some of Grove's earliest poetry. This opinion is supported by the fact that the Miscellaneous Poems not only contain three of Grove's manuscript German poems (one of which dates back to 1907!) and their typed translations, but that the remaining poems reflect romantic and neo-romantic inspirations, that there exists no known manuscript source for them, and that all but one (MP 10/IM 15/33) are excluded from the In Memoriam collection.
Miscellaneous Poems (11 poems, Box 18, Fd. 24)
The contents of this thin, but eminently important folder in the Grove Archives consist of three German manuscript poems and eight English typescripts on loose leaves. It must be noted here again that there is no reference to these German manuscripts in the Register of the Frederick Philip Grove Collection, neither in the context of his poetry (p. 32) nor anywhere else. This deplorable fact may have prevented a more widespread appreciation of the evidence pointing to Grove's German background which was available long before Spettigue's spectacular discovery of Felix Paul Greve's existence in October, 1971.
The three German manuscripts and Grove's typed translations are, of course, a central asset to the Grove Collection. But there are also four other lyrical poems not found anywhere else. The voluminous The Legend of the Great Survival (MP 11), which is a faithful typescript of a manuscript version in the Notebook (NB 29) and resembles the Legend of the Planet Mars (IM 30/NB 18) in the final In Memoriam section, is the only independent typescript of an epic narrative. The tone and stance of all these poems suggest that they represent the earliest layers of Grove's poetry, and it is not impossible that German originals will be found for them one day.
While ten of the eleven poems are unique, Night Thoughts (MP 10) is included in the In Memoriam collection as the final poem of The Dirge cycle (IM 15/33); but here, it has a title, and adds an explicit reference to Shelley after the motto-like opening line.
As for many of the other English poems, the physical situation is extremely complex, and is accordingly difficult to describe. In order to convey an impression of the complicated reality, both the poems and the leaves have been assigned arbitrary number sequences.
The German manuscripts (MP 1-3) which provide an opportune juncture leading into Greve's poetry, will be addressed last in more detail:
MP 1 "Die Dünen fliegen auf..." (1 L.)
MP 2 "Dies ist der Wald..." (1 L.; with MP 3)
MP 3 "Sag, hebt sich dein Herz..." (with MP 2)
The remaining eight typescripts represent English poems:
MP 4 You and I (versions a, b, c on two leaves)
MP 5 Retrospection (with MP 6 on one page)
MP 6 [The Sonnet] (with MP 5 on one page)
MP 7 Night (versions a and b on 1 leaf; 7b with 8a on one page)
MP 8 Arctic Woods (versions a and b; 8a with 7b on one page)
MP 9 The Dying Year (versions a and b; 9a with 8b on one page)
MP 10 Night Thoughts (1 page)
MP 11 The Legend of the Great Survival (on 11 leaves)
Four of the eleven MP poems exist in several versions (MP 4, 7, 8, and 9). Their distribution becomes especially clear when MP 4-9 are described in their physical manifestations, that is in their assigned page sequence:
L. 1, recto: MP 4 in version a
L. 1, verso: MP 5+6 are both on this page
L. 1a, recto: MP 4 in version b
L. 1a, verso: MP 4 in version c
L. 2, recto: MP 7 a stands alone on this page
L. 2, verso: MP 7 b and 8 a are both on this page
L. 3, recto: MP 9 a and 8 b are both on this page
L. 3, verso: (blank)
L. 4, recto: MP 9 b stands alone on this page
L. 4, verso: (blank)
L. 5, recto: Night thoughts (MP 10 = IM 15/33)
L. 5, verso: (blank)
L. 6-16, recto: Legend of the Great Survival (MP 11 = NB 11)
L. 6-16, verso: (blank)
Of the three versions a, b, and c of You and I (MP 4), version c has been represented in this edition as the latest. Version a is untitled and contains three manuscript corrections which are duly reflected in the subsequent versions b and c. Both of these later versions have the following two-lined title: From: Poems of the Lakes and Woods / Subtitle: You and I. This suggests that Grove wanted to regroup them in some collection, possibly with the intention of publication.
An additional manuscript correction to version b is interesting because it reverses the meaning of stanza 4, l. 2: "My wish, it did come true" in a and c reads in b "My wish did not come true". The topic being Grove's relationship with his wife (who also did most of the typing), the change has been understandably, but quite uncharacteristically ignored, so that the far more positive original wording remains unchanged in the last version c.
Although You and I has been treated as one poem, it consists actually of three parts: there are twice two stanzas, and once three; each cluster has a distinctly different form, and one could have considered them as three separate entities.[96] As a compromise, each part has been included individually in the First Line Index.
MP 5 + 6 exist only in this one version which is typed on the verso of leaf 1. The title of MP 6, "The Sonnet", has been crossed out, so that the two poems appear like a double sonnet with a mirror effect: Retrospection has two initial tercets followed by two drawn-together quatrains, while The Sonnet adheres to the conventions of the Petrachan sonnet which prescribe two quatrains and two tercets. The only element preventing a flawless symmetry after the elimination of the title is the separation of the two quatrains in the sonnet. Had they been combined, the structure would have resulted in a perfect 3-3-8//8-3-3 arrangement. Or, conversely, a separation into two quatrains in Retrospection would have had the same symmetric effect.
Night (MP 7) which is particularly reminiscent of Stefan George, exists by itself on the recto of leaf 2 in version a, and then again on the verso of the same page in a corrected version b with the title From: Poems of the Lakes and Woods / Subtitle: Visions.
Version b of Night is succeeded on the same page by version a of MP 8 Arctic Woods. This poem is a translation of the German manuscript MP 2, "Dies ist der Wald...". The earlier version (MP 8a) is reproduced with the Unique Poems in the context of Poems of the Lakes and Woods / Subtitle: Visions, while the later version MP 8b is presented adjacent to its German source.
The Dying Year (MP 9) has special importance, since it is Grove's English rendering of "Die Dünen fliegen auf..." (MP 1), which in turn is a replica of Greve's Erster Sturm of 1907. In its earlier version MP 9a, The Dying Year appears first on leaf 3, where it is followed on the same page by the corrected version b of Arctic Woods (MP 8b). A collective title, as present on the verso of leaf 2 for the combination of MP 7 Night and MP 8a Arctic Woods, is absent there.
Leaf 3, which combines the translations of Grove's German manuscript poems The Dying Year (MP 9a) and Arctic Woods (MP 8b), has been used to provide the English equivalents next to their German originals (MP 1+2). Version b of The Dying Year (MP 9b) stands alone on leaf 4, and reflects major manuscript corrections to version a; it has the additional title Visions, which is why the poem (along with MP 8a) has been included in this later version with the Unique Poems.
Because of their outstanding importance, the two translations of Grove's German poems (MP 8 and MP 9) are exceptionally included in two versions: they are first placed next to their German equivalents, and also appear in facsimile on pp. 59b and 59c. In a different version and in the context of the collective titles Poems of the Lakes and Woods and Visions, they are part of the section entitled Unique Poems.
Grove's German poems in Miscellaneous Poems Finally, there are the three untitled manuscript poems in German on two leaves. Even without the confirmation that MP1 was published by Greve in 1907, all three reflect the aestheticism and neo-romantic style representative of the members of the influential Stefan George circle.
MP 1 "Die Dünen fliegen auf..." (1 l.)
MP 2 "Dies ist der Wald..." (1 l.)
MP 3 "Sag, hebt sich dein Herz..."(with MP 2)
MP 1, "Die Dünen fliegen auf...", has five stanzas written sideways on what appears to be a ledger leaf. The fifth stanza is placed to the right, next to the third. It is a close replica of Greve's Erster Sturm as published in Die Schaubühne (1907). A comparison between the two reveals that Grove's poem differs from its precursor in four lexical replacements, three of which are synonymous: "falb" was originally "gelb" (st. 2), and represents a realistic precision in the colour of a horse.[98] Stanzas 3 and 4 are reversed, which is the only major formal discrepancy, so that "Fahnen" replaces the old-fashioned, precious "Banner" now in st. 4 (the original st. 3). In stanza 1, "wirr" was "grün" - again, there is a shift from an abstract colour adjective to a more palpably descriptive one. The final stanza reads "tönen wild" instead of "heulen schwer".
There are furthermore two syntactical rearrangements in stanza 3 (orig. st. 4) and stanza 5, both of which abandon a stilted pre-placed adjective structure in favour of simpler German syntax: "Seht graugepanzert ihr die Schiffe nahn" becomes "Seht ihr die Schiffe durch die Lüfte nahn", and "Zum Flattern bunter Fetzen all der Fahnen" is changed with similar effect to "Zum Flattern all der Fetzen bunter Fahnen".
These variations could be considered negligeable, given that Grove jotted this poem down ten, twenty, or even thirty years after its conception. They demonstrate, however, a noteworthy transition from neo-romantic preciosity to a more sober and powerfully realistic ideal of art. The same trend is further emphasized in Grove's own translation The Dying Year (MP 9).
MP 2, "Dies ist der Wald..." has four stanzas which are also written sideways on a ledger page. In typical, neo-romantic imagery there is a somber, spooky forest with intimations of decay and death everywhere. The water in the ditches resembles the iridescent eyes of ghostlilke entities, and the protagonist is torn between fear and morbid attraction. The mid-day heat and light are screened from this forest by a mysterious, grey wing, lending the setting the appearance of a living grave. A white horse, immobilized in flight, is seen beyond the treetops. The theme is death which is symbolized by the supernatural presence of the white horse evoking the apocalyptic riders.
In Grove's translation Arctic Woods (MP 8), an especially masterful shift in emphasis takes place: while Grove adheres closely to the original overall, a few slight changes achieve the transformation from a supernatural scene into the realistic Canadian winter landscape announced in the title: ghostlike, iridescent eyes become simply large eyes. The association of decaying flesh expressed by the pallid white of birch trunks is changed to the vulnerable whiteness of bare skin. The white horse is now suggestively "snow-white", and it is "frozen" in flight. A general you has become a personal I, and now depicts one helpless individual faced with the threat of a harsh, but natural environment.
The two stanzas of the fragment MP 3, "Sag, hebt sich dein Herz...", are written at a right angle in the margin of "Dies ist der Wald...". The fragment consists of four rhetorical questions, expressing the high-flying fantasies and lies of someone who is trying to escape a drab, everyday existence. In a way, it is another manifestation of hyperbolical embellishments well known from Grove's autobiographical fiction, and particularly prominent in his correspondence with Wolfskehl in 1902. Never satisfied with what he was in Europe or Canada, Grove kept obsessively inventing what he might -- and in his opinion, should -- have been.[99]
In spite of a noticeable and skilful shift towards realism by way of subtle, but significant changes in tone and content in Grove's translations MP 8 and MP 9, all eight English poems assembled in this important source folder betray their early origins. Like the three German poems present there, they follow the aesthetic rules of the impressionist and neo-romantic conventions championed by the Stefan George circle. Grove's next three German poems obviously have their roots in the same early phase of Greve/Grove's creativity.
Grove's German poems in the Spettigue Collection
- SC 1 Apokalypse
- SC 2 Kopfschmerz
- SC 3 "Das Fieber, das die Schläfen..."
These three poems were discovered by Grove's son Leonard who sent them to D. O. Spettigue in April, 1968.[100] They are very similar to the three poems in Miscellaneous Poems. All six of Grove's German poems bear the mark of what was fashionable in Germany around 1900.
SC 1, Apokalypse, appears to be a fragment in four parts. Each has three quatrains in pentameters, an unusally long and narrative meter for Grove's lyric poetry. A fifth part is indicated by a Roman numeral only, suggesting that more was to follow. The theme is the impact of a personal crisis. In the first part, the narrator reviews his past which he compares to a dreamy port symbolizing security. An unspecified intrusion has turned everything upside down, and he is looking now at the ruins of his existence, wondering if his great expectations have been permanently shattered. Contrasting sharply with the grey tones surrounding him, he evokes in the second part a colourful vision of an exotic beauty with black eyes and orchid-like lips, representing sunny climes and a splendid past. In the third part, he returns to the scene of sad isolation which is now illustrated with pale suns, cold stars and moons, and icy winds. He compares his former self to Prometheus, an adventurer, a martyr, a rebel despising security and conventions. In the last part, he considers his bold ambitions an audacity which had to be punished with his present destitution. He implores an allegorical Time to free him of this painful existence.
The inspiration of Apokalypse might be rooted in the reversal of Greve's fortunes in May 1903. Prior to his arrest, he had spent several lavish months with Else Endell in Palermo. Shortly after his downfall, he referred to his imprisonment as a "Katastrophe" in a letter to the Insel publisher von Poellnitz.[101]
A similar belief in a causal link between bold personal ambitions and cruel punishment is expressed in Grove's The Voice (IM 10, NB 1), The Gods (IM 2), and in Greve's Irrfahrt (WA 14) in Wanderungen. Promethean or Faustian themes are central in numerous other poems as well, as in The Rebel's Confession (IM 4), The Eagles (IM 29) and Ahasuerus (IM 31).
SC 2, Kopfschmerz, consists of four quatrains in the usual iambic meter, and describes the sorry state of someone waking up with a hangover. The narrator sees himself reflected in a mirror, where his head appears like the unstable vision of a dark-red flower. Its petals disolve first into kaleidoscopic fragments, then into nothingness. He sinks back into his cushions only to be subjected to the most painful noises, while he curses those who are abandoning him in his misery. If the vision of the exotic flower and its dissolution was meant to convey some deep, symbolic meaning, it fails in being convincing. The dominant impression is one of a common hangover. As in Beethoven's piano piece Die Wut über den verlorenen Groschen, the occasion and its emotional impact are out of proportion, so that the result is tragicomic at best.
SC 3, "Das Fieber..." is an untitled sonnet. It describes an inner fire (a "fever") which has consumed the protagonist since his birth. It distinguishes him from those who only talk and don't dare to act or live recklessly. The final tercet represents the antipode to the high-flying ambitions expressed before, contrasting them with the grey reality of everyday life.
As in Apokalypse (SC 1), the Promethean theme is again prominently exploited. In addition, some positively disturbing aspects of the Nietzschean "strong", "special" individual are in evidence: there is talk of "die rote Lust der Kriege", which rhymes beautifully with "Mutter aller großen Siege". The use of a brutal topos, unfortunately quite common before 1914, and the absence of similar martial imagery in Grove's poetry indicates that the conception of this poem predates the horrors of two World Wars.[102]
Grove's six German poems from the Grove and Spettigue Archives have been placed in the centre of this edition to provide a chronological link and continuum between Greve's earlier and Grove's later poetic creations. The six German poems by Frederick Philip Grove bear a striking resemblance both in form and in content to the poetry of Felix Paul Greve. They display the kind of esoteric aestheticism popular in Germany in the first decade of this century. It was particularly favoured by the poets affiliated with the elitist Stefan George circle which Greve is known to have courted until his imprisonment in 1903. Even though he adopted and reflected new models afterwards -- for instance, Flaubert -- it appears that he never deviated from the poetic conventions he absorbed in his formative years.
It is true that the aetheticism in Grove's German poems seems to have little in common with most of Grove's mature poetry. But even in his English poetry, some old thematic preoccupations appear repeatedly, and certain formal characteristics prevail throughout, regardless of shifted or new contents. These formal invariables reflect the principles expounded and practiced by the George circle in its influential journal Blätter für die Kunst (1898-1919). They will be further described in the context of Greve's poetry.
The sources of Greve's poetry Felix Paul Greve's poetry as known to date consists of the following materials which are presented, as far as possible, in the chronological order of their composition:
- the collection Wanderungen which was privately published in February, 1902
- seven tidily presented manuscript poems sent to Stefan George in August, 1902 for publication in Blätter für die Kunst
- a stanza Greve inserted in a letter to Wolfskehl in October, 1902; (a version of Irrender Ritter (WA 23), which was sent to Wolfskehl shortly before the publication of Wanderungen, is covered in the variant notes of this poem on p. 30)
- seven poems by Fanny Essler, printed in Die Freistatt, 1904/1905:
Gedichte (Heft 35, 27. 8. 1904, pp. 700-701)
Drei Sonette: ein Portrait (Heft 42, 10. 10. 1904, pp. 840-841)
Gedichte (Heft 12, 10. 3. 1905, pp. 185-186)
- three poems published individually in journals:
Die Hexe, Freistatt 6, Heft 26 (25. 6. 1904), p. 519
Erster Sturm, Schaubühne 3, no. 6 (7. 2. 1907), p. 154.
Die Stadt am Strande, Schaubühne 3, no. 23 (6. 6.1907), p. 570.
Poems in Greve's correspondence with Wolfskehl
A substantial number of Greve's letters and postcards to Wolfskehl have recently surfaced in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv in Marbach where they had slumbered amongst other unprocessed possessions for some time. These documents provide invaluable information about Greve's life and aspirations for the period of December, 1901 to October, 1902, and even include two photograph postcards depicting Greve in Gardone on the shores of Lago di Garda in August, 1902. Two letters contain poems, and the first of these is the earliest of Greve's known poetic expressions:
- in late January, 1902, Greve asked Wolfskehl for his opinion about some improvements he had made to Irrender Ritter, a copy of which he included. This poem concludes the collection Wanderungen which was published shortly afterwards in February.[105] The few and minor discrepancies in this manuscript have been noted in relation to the published version which is presented here on p. 30.
- in October, 1902, Greve was obviously in a crisis situation which may not have been unrelated to the troubles reflected a few weeks later in his correspondence with the director of the Insel-Verlag, von Poellnitz. To Wolfskehl, Greve speaks of shattered hopes[107] which may destroy him, and he hints darkly that he is leaving Germany in the near future.[108] He expresses gratitude to the Wolfskehls for their hospitality in Munich, and then introduces a single quatrain with these words: "I must ask you again not to inquire [about the reasons]. Instead, I will present you here with a few very poor lines".[109] These four "bad lines" have been included in this edition on p. 38, following the seven poems Greve had sent to Stefan George in August, 1902.
Wanderungen
This collection of Greve's poetry was privately published in February 1902. It was printed by the famous Otto von Holten press, and distributed through the Munich bookstore Littauer. Greve dedicated it to "Dem Freunde und Gefährten Herman F. C. Kilian", and as motto, he chose a line from Goethe's Iphigenie: "Vernimm, ich bin aus Tantalos' Geschlecht."
The copy extant in the University of Manitoba Archives was autographed by Greve for Karl Vollmöller.[110] The structure of the arrangement resembles Grove's In Memoriam collection: there is one poem as introduction, and one as conclusion. Under several collective titles, the poems are often untitled and numbered, suggesting a preference for thematic cycles.
In an introductory sonnet called Frage, the poet anxiously wonders about the nature of his creative abilities. Five sections follow, which are entitled Cäsarische Zeit, Wanderungen, Tagszeiten, Aus hohen Bergen, and Lieder des Dankes und Gedenkens. The initial poem and Cäsarische Zeit exude a typical, George-like atmosphere: there is the master, seen as a high priest; there are the disciples; there is the object of adoration, Art, and there is the elite of artists in haughty opposition to the "stupid masses". The typical settings are temples, precious marble halls, purple velvet and silken thrones.
The five poems in the section Wanderungen depict Greve as a restless, gifted artist in search of his special destiny. The Tagszeiten deal symbolically with morning, noon and night themes, while Aus hohen Bergen contains two neo-romantic legends charged with supernatural elements.
In Lieder des Dankes und Gedenkens, the author acknowledges more contemporary influences, in particular the "masters": the poet Stefan George, the philosopher Nietzsche, the painter Böcklin and the composer Beethoven. Individual poems are only devoted to Nietzsche and Böcklin. Antiquity is represented in the two statues of Herakles Farnese and Athena Lemnia. Finally, women are honoured in a context of noble renunciation, which is also expressed in the medieval setting of the concluding poem Irrender Ritter.
Formally and thematically, this collection reflects the emulation of the George circle, and fashionable aspects of Nietzsche and Goethe. Otto Bierbaum, who reviewed it in the Insel, saw it as a fairly tasteless imitation, and used the occasion to harangue against "das leere Aesthetentum" in general.[112] Greve published a self-review in April 1902, in which he modestly judged three of the twenty-three poems "good", six "good average", and thirteen not so good.[113] He cites the central poem (WA 14) of the section Wanderungen in its entirety, presumably considering it one of his three successful realizations. Two years later, Greve judged himself more harshly. On the eve of his release from prison, he announced in a letter to O. A. H. Schmitz that he had destroyed all remaining copies of his collection, and that he hoped that it could now be forgotten, if not forgiven: "Meine Gedichte, deren noch übrige Exemplare ich habe einstampfen lassen, werden nun hoffentlich, wenn nicht verziehen, so doch vergessen werden."[114]
Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's opinion of Greve's poems Wanderungen some twenty years after their publication is as revealing as it is accurate: she aptly identifies its main characteristic as "utter artificiality", and links it to the Stefan George circle Greve had tried to impress: "His poems were as well cut gems of language juggling without blood-call - but the call of an ambitious, industrious spirit... The most impressive part about this kind of poetry is paper, print and numbered privacy. It stood for the top-notch of culture."[115]
Poems in the Stefan George Archiv
There are seven manuscript poems by Greve in the Stefan George Archiv in Stuttgart, and Greve's correspondence with Wolfskehl allows to reconstruct their precise genesis in mid-1902. There are also five letters by Greve to Stefan George, and three to Friedrich Gundolf extant,[116] but although they throw a revealing light on Greve's manic activities during the summer and fall of 1902,[117] they are not pertinent to his poems.
On August 18, 1902 Greve voiced keen interest in placing some poems in in Blätter für die Kunst.[118] Another letter to Wolfskehl reveals that they were written on August 23, and an empty envelope in George's papers indicates that they were mailed on August 27, 1902.[120] However, George found Greve's submission insufficient for an introduction in the Blätter,[121] and consequently, they were never published. George's verdict must be taken as a qualitative judgement, since many other "Einführungsbeiträge" were even shorter than Greve's seven poems. It is also possible that Greve's unsavory conduct prevented their publication: as early as February, 1902 Wolfskehl had warned Gundolf of Greve's alarming escapades ("Münchhausiaden"), and wondered if he was quite well.
Greve's manuscript is written sideways, and has a title page which states in two lines and in capital letters: GEDICHTE VON / FELIX PAUL GREVE. Six poems are untitled, and they are, not surprisingly given the chronological proximity, very similar in tone and atmosphere to poems in the first three sections of Wanderungen. The second poem is entitled Mona Lisa, and it is particularly reminiscent of Athena Lemnia in the Antike section. In obvious imitation of the "George-Mache", capitals for nouns are avoided throughout, and curious dots are inserted instead of commas. These particularities have been maintained in this edition. The title-page and Mona Lisa can be seen in facsimile on p. 38b.
Fanny Essler poems Seven poems were published in 1904 and 1905 under the pseudonym Fanny Essler.[124] In answer to legitimate questions about how and why those poems would be included here as Greve's, a somewhat lengthy digression is required. It must address the choice of the pseudonym, the notable change in gender it implies, the real-life woman behind it, the likely genesis of these Fanny Essler poems, and the probability of shared authorship.
In 1905 and 1906, Greve published his two voluminous novels, both of which were based on the life of Else Endell. She was his companion for about ten years, and although it is unlikely that they were ever married legally,[126] Greve referred to her as his wife when she was still married to August Endell.[127] They became attracted to each other in the Fall of 1902. At Christmas, they were lovers,[128] and in January, 1903 they eloped to Palermo, taking the distraught husband along as far as Naples.[129] In late May, 1903 Greve went to Bonn, allegedly on a business matter. There he was arrested upon his arrival, and jailed for defrauding his friend Kilian, to whom he had dedicated his Wanderungen in February, 1902. Else remained in Palermo for some time, travelled elsewhere in Italy, and rejoined Greve in early June, 1904 in Cologne.[130] She later became known as the eccentric artist Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven of Greenwich Village in the late teens and early twenties. Her autobiography, which she composed after her return to Berlin between 1923 and 1926, provides a mirror-image account of the events described in Greve's two novels. This remarkable document also proves that Greve did not commit suicide in 1909, as the Insel publisher Anton Kippenberg had rightly suspected even then,[132] that he emigrated instead to the United States "via Canada", that he had her join him in Kentucky in 1910, and that he left her there within a year after their reunion.[134]
Greve's second novel, Maurermeister Ihles Haus, deals with her childhood and adolescence, and is of lesser interest here. His first novel, Fanny Eßler, however, describes her life in Berlin during the 1890s, and can be considered a roman-à-clef of the George circle, several members of which Else knew intimately. Greve himself appears as the elegant Friedrich Karl Reelen who is a friend of Fanny's husband Eduard Barrel (Endell).[136]
Marcus Behmer remarked to Ernst Hardt in February 1907: "Fanny Essler[137] is just wonderful...The book is also cheeky as far as the other persons are concerned. And it has not been read much? Strange, in spite of this beastly impertinence?!"[138] Ernst Hardt had been Else's lover, and appeared as Ehrhard Stein in the novel.[139] Nearly three decades later, Wolfskehl says the following about this novel, confirming its lack of impact: "You know, there is a defamatory book by this 'master of pseudo-identities', F. L. (sic!) Greve, of the early times. In it, there are, next to many caricatures of the immediate environment, mostly M[elchior] L[echter]'s, also relatively few respectless allusions to the master's [Stefan George's] appearance. This pamphlet, a voluminous affair, remained totally unknown, I do not have it anymore myself; even its title, some woman's name, is escaping -- at least momentarily -- my recollection."[140] Else's opinion of this novel was unfavourable as well, both at the time and twenty years later. She judged Greve's style à la Flaubert "abrupt..., dry and artificial, having no carrying power or convincing quality of its own." She even started doubting Greve's artistic talent because of it, but gave him credit for being a potential "business genius" instead. Her aesthetic judgement, applied here as to Greve's Wanderungen, earlier, proves to be amazingly accurate from the vantage-point of a seventy-year distance.
In an extremely informative letter to Gide in October 17, 1904, Greve indicated that he was using the name of his fictional heroine as a pseudonym for some poetry publications: "And now about me. I must work in rather strange ways. I am not one person any more, I am three: 1. Monsieur Felix Paul Greve. 2. Madame Else Greve.[143] 3. Madame Fanny Essler. The latter, whose poems I shall send you shortly, and which are -- this is still a secret -- addressed to me, is a poet already well regarded in some parts of Germany...".
This amazing revelation is followed by another one, not less surprising: Greve announces that he also intends to publish an anonymous autobiography under the title of the pseudonym: "Jusqu'à présent elle n'a publié que des vers. Mais moi, F. P. Greve, son patron et introducteur, prépare la publication de deux romans qu'elle a écrit dans la prison de Bonn sur Rhin...Personne ne se doute de cet état des choses...l'un des romans de Mme Essler, qui paraîtra sans nom d'auteur et que M. l'éditeur croit une autobiographie, aura pour titre: Fanny Essler."[145] Fanny Essler's poems were actually published, but this second plan never materialized: Fanny Eßler was kept as the title of Else's biography, Greve was clearly presented as the author, and the genre was openly identified as fiction.[146]
Note that the masculine gender is maintained for Fanny Essler in "un poète (!) déjà assez consideré (!)", that for his/her poems Greve is explicitly stated as the subject-matter, and that further gender-confusion is introduced by "her" writing two novels about her life in Bonn when it is well known that and why Greve was there, while Else was in Italy!
With the possible exception of the final instalment on March, 1905, the seven Fanny Essler poems were printed before the novel. The first two poems appeared on August 27, 1904; they were preceded by Greve's "Die Hexe", and a piece of Browning's Kleon,[147] and followed in the next issue by his Meredith-article on September 3, 1904.[148] The three Fanny Essler poems, Ein Portrait: drei Sonette, are published six weeks later on October 10,[149] and finally, after an interval of almost six months, the last two Fanny Essler poems are printed on March 25, 1905.[150] This picture of Greve's manic productions confirms that he was not altogether lying when he told Gide about an incredibly long list of achievements accomplished in a few weeks in the summer of 1904![151]
By some curious coincidence, essays by Ernst Hardt, August Endell, O. A. H. Schmitz, Karl Vollmöller and Franz Blei are represented in the same two Freistatt volumes as well. As Greve candidly admits to Gide in his letter of October 17, 1904 (p.40), it is the only journal available to him at that time. It ceased publication with Heft 39 in September, 1905.
Die Freistatt is described as an intellectual review of high standing, and famous names like Ebner-Eschenbach, Liliencron, and Wedekind are cited in evidence. It is curious to find that Friedrich Huch, who was a prominent figure in Wolfskehl's salon, was one of the editors precisely during the period of Greve's hyper-active manifestations,[152] and one may speculate that Greve was making good use of an old contact.
Why the choice of the name Fanny Essler? It is possible that Greve was deliberately confusing the reading public with the family name (which also contains the first name Else): the famous Viennese dancer Fanny Elssler (1810-1874 - note that Else was born in the year this woman died!) was receiving much attention around that time for the publication of various memoirs and biographies. It is certainly stunning to see a lithograph (1840) of Fanny Elssler in action as frontispiece to volume 4 of Broom, 1922, and further along Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's only poem in this journal, "Circle", with an oblong, abstract illustration.[153] If this juxtaposition is pure coincidence, it is a strange one indeed.
There are further intertextual links which are pointing to the artistic scene in Munich. Fanny Elssler's first name was Franziska, as was Franziska "Fanny" von Reventlow's (1871-1918). Her unconventional life and her affiliation with Wolfskehl's social centre of gravity guarantee that both Greve and Else knew of her, and they may well have known her personally as well. Her autobiographical novel Ellen Olestjerne was published in 1903 (around this time, she was involved with Wolfskehl's friend Klages), and her depiction of the Munich boheme, ca. 1900-1905, appeared in 1913 as Herrn Dame's Aufzeichnungen. She was, incidentally, born and raised in Husum, a reference to which town appears in Fanny Essler's last two poems.
This complex situation surrounding the choice of a title and identical pseudonym may serve as further indication that Grove did later not entirely relinquish old-standing habits -- in theory, at least -- such as adopting a variety of identities, masks, and roles. As mentioned above, he toyed with the idea of of using an Andrew Rutherford pseudonym around 1922 for his first book publication Over Prairie Trails, and it also appears in the poetry Notebook in relation to his unfinished novel Jane Atkinson. Given the biographical connections with Greve's friend-turned-foe, Herman Kilian,[154] his maternal Scottish grandfather Rutherford, and his daughter's (and possibly, mother's) first name Jane, the choice of this particular pseudonym is charged with almost as many intricate and multilayered references as "Fanny Essler" was in 1904/1905. It only lacks the dimension of another person -- like Else -- partaking in these fireworks of brilliant projections.
Seen together, the seven Fanny Essler poems are carefully structured as a triptych, like a medieval altar-piece: first, Fanny/Else bewails in two untitled poems the absence of her lover (Greve) while alone in the southern climes of "Tunis" during the Fall of 1903. The absent lover is the focus of her adoration in the centre piece: Ein Porträt: drei Sonette gives a timeless, static description of his hands, eyes and mouth in the conventions of the Petrarchan tradition. The impression of coldness and rigid control matches the depiction of Greve as Friedrich Karl Reelen in the Fanny Essler novel, and Else's factual account of him in her autobiography. The final two untitled poems evoke a northern setting in much the same way as the initial ones referred to southern surroundings: the only element missing in an otherwise perfect winter day is her lover's presence.
The flawless symmetry of these poems is only disturbed by the reversal of biographical and chronological givens: the final, northern landscape ("Husum", and "der Friesen flachem Land" are specific references) corresponds in fact to the Frisian island Föhr where Else Endell longed for Greve before they became lovers in Berlin around Christmas, 1902 and "eloped" to Italy in January, 1903. The initial southern flank describes her loneliness in Palermo (not Tunis) after he was unexpectedly jailed in Bonn in May, 1903.
The question of authorship of the Fanny Essler poems arises above and beyond the intricate blending of narrative voice, gender, and biographical facts: Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's papers in Maryland contain several versions of a poem which is obviously a shortened replica of the final, rondo-like Fanny Essler poem.[155] Else's five versions have titles like "Natur", "Naturbild", "Freude", or simply "Du". All have seven stanzas, while the original Fanny Essler poem has twelve. Eliminated are stanzas 5-9 which describe the North Sea location. Next to most titles, one finds in compensation these explicit references: "An F. P. G.", and: "Wyk auf Föhr".
This poem may be one of her earliest attempts at poetic expression, all of which were inspired by her relationship with Greve. As Else describes in her autobiography (p. 30), she first felt (apart from some childhood-efforts) the imperative need to express herself poetically when she became romantically obsessed with him in November, 1902, while she was at Gmelin's sanatorium in Boldixum near Wyk auf Föhr: "About this time...I made after an interval of years my first -- for an amateur amazing (sic!) good poem for nature's necessity -- to express love somehow."[156] She next mentions turning to poetry as an emotional outlet after having suddenly been left behind by Greve in Palermo, in late May, 1903: "I had no thoughts about the future other than to see Felix. That was only a year! I was too gloriously in love! The true trouble was physical abstinence - it was excruciatingly painful to me. I had to make poems again!" (p. 92). For the third and last time, she mentions using this therapeutic strategy as an emotional soother when she is staying in Rome on her way to meet Greve in Köln upon his release (in May, 1904): "I again began to occupy myself with poetry in the usual half-hearted fashion of the amateur, the only one then possible to me." (p. 195).
These references to her poetic expressions and their source of inspiration confirm that she did in fact create several poems between late 1902 and 1904, and that all of them revolved around her memorable experiences with Greve in Wyk auf Föhr, Berlin, Palermo, and Rome -- most of them were created in her lover's absence which tinges her passionate attachment to him with a certain illusory quality.
This evidence from Freytag-Loringhoven's autobiographical writings increases the suspicion that Greve's claim to authorship of the Fanny Essler poems is only partially valid. She explains with regard to his novels, that he was mainly assuming polishing and marketing functions: "It was my life and persons out of my life. He did the executive part of the business, giving the thing the conventional shape and dress" (p. 34). Greve had discouraged her from writing "a story of my childhood -- from sheer ennui-urge of own inner occupation -- interest that he himself promptly contradicted as a 'swelled head' in ironical derision on account of my literary attempt that he regarded shoulder-shruggingly contemptuous -- but with leniency, since he could not hinder it in a sense of 'Let the child -- or silly female -- have her play..." (p.105). That story of her childhood was, of course, published as Greve's second novel Maurermeister Ihles Haus.
In analogy to the genesis of this publication and the Fanny Essler novel, it is not unlikely that Greve appropriated more than Else's biographical material in the case of the Fanny Essler poems as well. On the other hand, accusing him of simply stealing from his companion would not do him justice. The intertextual references to the Petrarchan canon, for instance, and the formal accomplishment of the Fanny Essler poetry cycle go far beyond a little polishing and marketing, and they are the clear mark of Greve's remarkable craftmanship and his vast cultural horizon (even at age 25!) -- two elements which were comparatively limited in Else's case at the time. The Fanny Essler poems must therefore be considered his as much as hers, and the pseudonym is understood to include both Else and Greve.
Greve's poems in journals
Greve is known to have published three individual poems between 1904 and 1907. It is likely that more are awaiting discovery, but at present, these are the only ones in evidence.[158]
Die Hexe appeared in the same volume of Freistatt 6 (1904) in which the first two Fanny Essler poems were published -- it even preceded them by two months. With its supernatural elements, it is still attuned to Greve's neo-romantic poetry of 1902, and bears a remarkable resemblance to Grove's "Dies ist der Wald..." (MP 2).
As discussed in the context of Grove's German poetry, Erster Sturm was published in Die Schaubühne in 1907. Grove probably wrote down his manuscript version of "Die Dünen fliegen auf..." (MP 1) in the late twenties, and he translated it as The Dying Year (MP 9). This poem depicts an allegorical Fall whose approach is announced in a medieval setting by a hurricane-like messenger who urges the masses to submit themselves to his master's irrevocable passing. The Fall is a symbolic representation of time. Like Die Hexe of 1904, Erster Sturm (1907) still reflects thematically and stylistically the poems of Greve's pre-prison period, as do all six of Grove's German poems.
Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's poem "Schalk" is a combination of Greve's "Erster Sturm" and the central Fanny Essler sonnets. In it, Else squares a bitter account with her lover's cruel abandonment in Kentucky, ca. 1911/1912.. At the top of most variants she specifies as location "Sparta, Kentucky, am Eagle Creek", and at the bottom of the particular version depicted here in facsimile on p. 49b, she states: "Der Herbst ist -- als Bild -- ein Porträt Felix Paul Greves".
Die Stadt am Strande was published in 1907 in the same volume of Die Schaubühne as Erster Sturm. Apart from the beautifully simple Fanny Essler poems, it represents a departure from Greve's other poetry. It displays a less precious stance, and contains fewer supernatural elements. It differs also formally from the usual iambic metre by the choice of the stately pentameter.[160] Significantly, the title specifies "Im Ton eines großen Franzosen" -- in other words, this is yet another imitation, and one pointing to a symbolist model, presumably Baudelaire.
It is worthwhile noting that during the time of "Die Hexe" and the Fanny Essler poems, Greve and Else lived in voluntary exile in Wollerau, Switzerland, and Paris-Plage, in Northern France. The remarkable concentration of Greve's publications in Freistatt at this time is explained by the fact that, as he openly admits to Gide, it is the only journal available to him then.[161] In 1907, Greve and Else lived in Berlin, and Die Schaubühne, not only contains these two poems by Greve, but also, for instance, a fragment of Gide's Saul.[162] It was edited there by the theatre-critic Siegfried Jacobsohn. Greve invited him to an opulent "wedding"-lunch in December, 1906, along with O. A. H. Schmitz, [163] so, although details are escaping present knowledge, personal acquaintance is attested. Jacobsohn is known to have been a faithful admirer of the progressive theatre director Max Reinhardt who founded the Kleine Theater in 1902 -- this is where Greve announced to Gundolf[164] that four plays by Oscar Wilde in his translation would be staged in October, 1902. The journal was founded in September, 1905, and its publication was handled first by Oesterheld, then Reiss publishers until 1912; both also were responsible for several of Greve's translations.
Comparison of Greve's and Grove's poetry The thematic and stylistic characteristics of the l'art pour l'art poetry popular in Germany during the first decade of this century are pervasively manifest in Greve's poetry, as well as in Grove's six German poems. However, Greve's last poem of 1907, "Die Stadt am Strande", already announces a certain new sobriety. This is indicative of a trend which will become a predominant feature of Grove's poetry. The differences between Greve's Erster Sturm and Grove's equivalent "Die Dünen fliegen auf..." (MP 1) reveal a deliberate attempt at neutralizing overly precious elements, such as an abundance of colour adjectives, or the twisted syntax of preposited genitives.[166] Grove's English translations of his German poems further emphasize the shift towards a realistic ideal of art. This is most noticeable in Arctic Woods, where a supernatural setting is cleverly transformed into a Canadian winter landscape with a minimum of formal adjustments.
All poems in Miscellaneous Poems exude an atmosphere and style similar to Greve's poetry, and it is probably not by coincidence that three of Grove's German poems are found among them. Some of Grove's poems in In Memoriam are also reminiscent of Greve's former decadent preoccupation: At Sea (IM 16), The Rebel's Confession (IM 4), and The Eagles (IM 29) may serve as examples for personal expressions of it; while the legends (IM 12, 30; NB 29/MP 11) and Konrad (NB 35) are evidence for a revealing genre preference which corresponds with similar epic narratives in Greve's Wanderungen. But apart from these and some other remnants of youthful poetic endeavours, Grove's poetry tends to be grave, stately, and didactic, and revolves around ontological themes. The tone is often bitter, at times cynical, and betrays rather somber views of existence and world order.
Greve's poetry reflects the Dionysian aspects of Nietzsche's dichotomy in Die Geburt der Tragödie which was well known to him, whereas Grove's poems represent the Apollonian side which is more attuned to his life-long admiration for Goethe.[168] The different treatment of the Fall theme in Greve's Erster Sturm and Grove's Indian Summer illustrates the Nietzschean polarity in exemplary fashion. To some extent, it simply corresponds to different stages of individual maturity.
Wolfskehl, whom Greve courted during 1901/2, represents the most expansive element of the Dionysian type in the George circle around that time. In general, any excess was frowned upon by "the master", Stefan George, so that Oscar Wilde, for instance, did not measure up to the ideals of "Zucht"[169] as prescribed and practiced in the circle, whereas his l'art pour l'art position was accepted as germane. As the fragments of Greve's biography demonstrate, he was far from subjecting himself to any self-imposed moderation.[170] In fact, he identified himself with Oscar Wilde with such a passion that he repeated even his idol's prison sentence (though for different reasons). As Else von Freytag-Loringhoven remarks about Greve's next role-model Flaubert whom he seems to have adopted while in prison, Greve did not only esteem his idols of art or style, he tried to be like them for better or worse, in literature and in life.[171]
The topos of lies, masks, and "as if"-identities plays a central role in Greve's life and works, but traces of it can be observed in Grove's biographical and literary projections as well. They are mostly rooted in Greve's intense preoccupation with Wilde,[172] but they are not less commonly encountered in Nietzsche. Also, the artful (or repressive) omissions or transformations in Goethe's memoirs Dichtung und Wahrheit served as an acknowledged pattern for Grove's autobiographical novels.
While overall, both the content and the tone differ considerably, the form in Greve's and Grove's German and English poetry remains constant, and reveals the clear imprint of the "George-Mache": besides the occasional sonnet, quatrains are the reigning form. The verse tends to employ the iambic metre, and to enclose syntactically relevant units. The rhyme usually coincides with full words like verbs and nouns. Enjambements and rhymed particles, as often found in Hofmannsthal and Rilke, were considered undesirable by the "master", and they were scrupulously avoided by Greve and Grove as well.
Especially in comparison with Greve's companion of a decade, Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, who became involved in avant-garde movements of her time with impressive flexibility in her middle years, Grove remained permanently grounded in the aesthetic conditioning he absorbed as a young man around 1900. There is no reflection of expressionism in any of Grove's works, whereas Else experimented readily with expressionist and dadaist techniques, both of which she applied very successfully in the late 1910s and early 1920s. It is also revealing that only scant traces of humour can be detected anywhere in Grove's poetry.[175] In contrast, Else created several hilarious parodies of her personal experiences.
There is much food for thought in this comparison, since it seems to suggest that an exaggerated concern for perfect form is detrimental to the expression of powerful, primary emotion. Observing how Grove attempted to cope with the loss of his only child through formal abstraction in some of the Dirge poems confirms his never-wavering dependency on the "George-Mache" once again: it matches particularly the concept of "pathetische Distanz", or a deliberate distancing from pathos, which Adorno coined in relation to the George circle.[177] It refers to an intellectual, moderating attitude which aims at typical representation through formal control -- precisely at the expense of realistic detail and emotion.
The thematic canon of the Stefan George circle revolves around nature, culture, man, Eros, and includes to a lesser extent critical views on civilization.[178] Neo-romantic and symbolist motifs in the guise of medieval, exotic, or sacral allusions are favoured, and myths, dreams, and supernatural elements occur frequently as well, as do dedications to "great men". Greve's poems adhere to all of these themes, with the possible exception of the last one, "Die Stadt am Strande", 1907. But precisely the neglected element of "Zeitkritik" breaks through with a vengeance in Grove's poetry, and it situates Grove's original background in a context much larger than that of the George circle.
The underlying philosophical premises in Grove's poetry are indebted to Nietzschean and neo-Kantian positions current at the time of Greve's upbringing. They are marked by a blend of "Lebensphilosophie" (as already announced in Goethe), nihilism (prepared by Kierkegaard), a strong sense of relativity (most influentially popularized by the physicist Ernst Mach), and the concurrent loss of a well-centred sense of self which had formerly been provided through religion.[180] Depth psychology, discovered by Freud and further propagated by Adler and Jung with different emphasis, also had an enormous impact on Greve's generation. Cultural pessimism was rampant, and it was expounded in vast panoramas of decadence, applying an organic "life"-principle -- reminiscent of Goethe's holistic concerns -- on a large (cultures) as well as a small scale (individuals). Language skepticism (Fritz Mauthner) was also a prominent concern for German speaking philosophers and authors of the time, so that there is much discussion of a "language crisis" to this day. Now nearly forgotten, Simmel and Klages were influential thinkers at the time. They had close connections with the George circle, and Greve was in personal contact with Klages.[182] The neo-Kantian Simmel is known for his semiotic analysis of money, and Klages, mainly influenced by Nietzsche, endeavoured to define character types and to develop graphology.
Grove's critical essays reveal the clear imprint of these trends. They bear titles like "Of the Interpretation of Life" (or History, Civilization, Science),[183] emulating classical title-conventions as well as Nietzsche's in Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, and a host of imitations thereof. A very striking similarity exists between Grove's essays and Vaihinger's Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911, composed more than two decades earlier): both authors consider the "laws" distilled for the humanities and even the "natural laws" of the sciences as useful fictions devoid of inherent truth, and as temporary, strictly pragmatic means of orientation for the contemporary, rather confused individual. The wide-spread dictum "ignoramus, ignorabimus"[184] crystallized these essentially skeptical opinions of an era, and Grove, who liked to use this catch-phrase verbatim,[185] also reflects it in his poetry.
In his youth, Greve believed that he had could find all essential answers in Nietzsche and kindred masters. The mature Grove is certain of one thing only: that the accumulation of man's knowledge and the fireworks of technological progress do not and cannot explain the essential secrets of life. They will remain a mystery for ever. There is only one certainty: we are born, we live, and we die (see Questions reasked, IM 7). This ultimate message remains constant in Grove's essays and poems, and contrasts with Greve's expressions of Promethean or Faustian delusions of grandeur.
Some editorial observations: Source situation summarized
For Greve's poetry, the source situation is straightforward. With rare exceptions, there is only one version to contend with. In contrast, Grove's poems often exist in as many as four or five parallel versions. To facilitate the location of various sources, a tabular overview has been given in addition to the synopsis of Grove's English poetry.
The typescript Poems: In Memoriam Phyllis May Grove has been used as the basis for Grove's poetry in this edition. It is by definition younger than the 39 manuscripts recorded in the Notebook from where they were transcribed. The main reason for this decision is that the typed collection provides the most comprehensive and authoritative text of all available sources, while the various other clusters reflect only a fraction of these 62 poems. Both Selections and From the Dirge were presumably derived from the In Memoriam typescript shortly after its completion around 1931/1932.
Grove made very few manuscript corrections to this typescript, which confirms the distinct impression that it was ready for imminent publication. Grove's alterations have been registered in footnotes which also cover differences detected in earlier (Notebook) or satellite selections (Canadian Forum and Selections). The large majority of comparative differences anywhere concern small discrepancies in punctuation. Unless they alter the expressive content in a significant way, they have not been described in too much detail.
Closest to Greve's poetry up to 1907 are the poems in Miscellaneous Poems which contain significantly three or half of Grove's German manuscripts. The remaining English poems betray both thematically and stylistically very early models, but their obviously unfinished status and the absence of explicit references to the time, occasion, and purpose of their existence does not allow any judgement whatsoever. Like Grove's poems marked "rejected" in the Notebook, and the narrative fragments extant in that source, they have been regrouped in the category of "unique poems" towards the end of the corpus. In a way, this is a violation of the chronological principle applied in this edition, but it is compensated by the fact that Grove's translations are exceptionally included twice, once next to their German originals in the centre, and again with other MP poems of early creation, but uncertain composition date. Collective titles like "Visions" indicate the intention of forming cycles similar to those found in other sources. Notes, furthermore, point to thematic or stylistic similarities in Greve's poems (for instance, the allegorical treatment of Night, Dawn and Fall in Wanderungen, or elsewhere).
Overall, the In Memoriam poems seem at first impression quite different from Greve's poetry, as far as thematic considerations and general atmosphere are concerned. Yet they consistently adhere to the same formal principles which Greve is known to have practiced around 1900. A few of Grove's poem even continue Greve's old, individualistic concerns, although Grove tended to cloak them in less flamboyant modes of expression.
Underlining of titled poems
The conventions of current style manuals prescribe that poems, like articles, be referred to in quotation marks. These rules have been observed in the bibliography, but they have deliberately been ignored in the table of contents and elsewhere for reasons of visual clarity. This is justified on the grounds that the difference between untitled and titled poems is virtually impossible without the typographical distinction adopted here in a context which is largely or entirely restricted to poetry. Therefore, titles of individual poems have been generally underlined, while quotation marks have been reserved for the first few words of untitled poems.
Dedications, mottos, dates and geographical indications
Many of the poems in Grove's cycle In Memoriam have dedications, dates, or geographiclal locations, especially in the section Landscapes. Often, these are stated more explicitly in Grove's Selections, while they tend to be absent in the Notebook and are entirely lacking in Canadian Forum. A separate list of poems with such references has been compiled for the appendices, and it includes specifications encountered in Greve's poetry as well..
The table of contents
In addition to tabular listings of Grove's poetry either above or in the appendices, most of the information concerning the complex, multi-layered representations of poems related to the In Memoriam complex is also reflected in the table of contents. Additional Notebook, Canadian Forum, and Selections occurrences, singly or combined, have been noted in abbreviated manner next to each of the poems concerned, and also, wherever applicable, for sources pertaining to Greve's situation. A brief indication of the structure of each poem has been included as well: namely, the extent of stanzas and lines, but not the metre (which in the majority of cases is the iambic pentameter), has been listed. These indications allow the reader to judge the length and form of any given poem at a glance. Since Greve/Grove's poems are generally only represented once in the text, the notes related to individual poems provide additional information about the existence of additional sources and other particularities.
Appendices of secondary sources
As complements to the structural and chronological orientation provided by the table of contents and tabular presentations in the introduction, separate listings of secondary sources have been compiled in the appendices. They particularly convey a good impression of a possible genesis of the poems represented in the authoritative In Memoriam arrangement. Seen in the light of the In Memoriam sequence, the Notebook poems are highly erratic, the beginning and the end of From the Dirge selection is deliberately "out of order" for structural and thematic reasons, and Selections are a linear reflection to such an extent that they did not warrant any separate In Memoriam listing at all. In spite of this, Selections are believed to precede From the Dirge, and may even have been selectively dismantled for its formation and publication in April, 1932.
First line index, and list of titled poems
An index of first lines, or in reality first words, allows the retrieval of any poem, whether titled or not, in one alphabetical sequence. It also integrates collective titles, which means that a sequence of usually untitled poems is regrouped under a unifying heading (as, for instance, Greve's Tagszeiten [four poems], or Grove's The Dirge [thirty-three poems]). The central column refers to the titles of poems, including those which have a collective title, the third column indicates the provenance and page reference to a given poem's occurrence in this edition.
The alphabetical list of titled poems also incorporates collective titles, which, for reasons of visual distinction, are the only ones underlined in this and the previously mentioned list. Note that a collective title may sometimes regroup a cluster of titled poems (WA, Antike; IM, Thoughts).
The word-concordance
Nouns and adjectives occurring in the poems represented in this edition have been consistently indexed, and interfiled in one alphabetical sequence regardless of their German or English context. On occasion, the language indication had to be specified, namely when the form of a word was identical, but either the meaning or the word category was different. Adverbs and prepositions have been indexed only in exceptional cases, or whenever they seemed to have special emphasis in a particular context. Titles, dedications, mottos and geographical names, whether present in a poem or in its surroundings, have been included as well.