KARL MARX

4° TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN 41
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three being dedicated to Jenny von Westphalen who, according to Sophie
Marx, 'wept tears of delight and pain' 64 on receiving them. She kept them
carefully all her life, though her daughter Laura related that 'my father
treated those verses with scant respect; each time that my parents spoke
of them, they laughed outright at these youthful follies'. 65 According to
the social-democrat historian Mehring, these poems, with one exception,
were all love lyrics and romantic ballads. He had had the opportunity of
reading them before the great majority were lost and judged them 'formless
in every sense of the word'. 66 They were full of gnomes, sirens, songs
to stars and bold knights, 'romantic in tone without the magic proper to
romanticism'. 67 They were, said Marx,
in accordance with my attitude and all my previous development, purely
idealistic. My heaven and art became a Beyond as distant as my love.
Everything real began to dissolve and thus lose its finiteness, I attacked
the present, feeling was expressed without moderation or form, nothing
was natural, everything built of moonshine; I believed in a complete
opposition between what is and what ought to be and rhetorical reflections
occupied the place of poetic thoughts, though there was perhaps
also a certain warmth of emotion and desire for exuberance. These are
the characteristics of all the poems of the first three volumes that Jenny
received from me. 68
Most of the few surviving poems are those written during the first half
of 1837, together with fragments of a dramatic fantasy and a comic novel.
Marx tried to publish some of these poems and sent them to Adelbert
von Chamisso, editor of the annual Deutscher Musenalmanacb, but the
issue had already gone to press. Although dedicated to his father,
the poems were not much to his taste and Heinrich Marx even encouraged
his son to attempt an ode which 'should glorify Prussia and afford an
opportunity of praising the genius of the Monarch .. . patriotic, emotional
and composed in a Germanic manner'. 69 Marx's models, however, were
Heine, Goethe and Schiller, and his verses contained all the well-known
themes of German romanticism, with the exception of political reaction
and nationalism. They were full of tragic love and talk of human destiny
as the plaything of mysterious forces. There was the familiar subjectivism
and extreme exaltation of the personality of the creative artist isolated
from the rest of society, while seeking, at the same time, for a community
of like-minded individuals. As a result of his love for Jenny,
With disdain I will throw my gauntlet
Full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pigmy giant
Whose fall will not stifle my ardour.