Volume 44, Number 12 · July 17, 1997
Paradise in a Dream
By Richard Holmes
The Blue Flower
by Penelope Fitzgerald
Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, 226 pp., $12.00 (paper)
The sensibility of early German Romanticism seems infinitely distant to us now. The very name Novalis, the pseudonym of the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), sounds like an astronomical explosion on the edge of some remote galaxy. The symbol of the Blue Flower, which he created in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, was never successfully transplanted into the English-speaking world. As the epitome of German Romantic longing, it was naturalized most convincingly in a delphic entry in one of Coleridge's Notebooks.
Review, 3093 words
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