ABSTRACT
Even as he criticized Tieck’s poetic license, Kierkegaard also admired his poetic genius. From the start, Kierkegaard appreciated Tieck’s irony, humor, sense of the uncanny, and gift for storytelling. He thought that Tieck’s ironic play was engaging, light, and at times quite insightful about human nature. Over time he absorbed Tieck’s Cervantic manner of combining earnestness with lightness, and soaked up Tieck’s
1 SKS 1, 316, 330-33, 337-8, 352-7 / CI, 280-81, 297-9, 305, 324-9. SKS 1, 5-57 / EPW, 53-102. For recent discussions in the secondary literature on Kierkegaard’s conceptions of poetic living, especially Christian forms of it, see Marcia C. Robinson, “Kierkegaard’s Conception of Poetic Living: Aesthetic Unity and Religious-Ethical Life-View in the Journals and Dissertation,” a paper presented at the Fifth International Kierkegaard Conference, Howard V. Hong and �dna H. Hong �ierkegaard �ibrary�� St. Olaf College�� June 11-15�� 2005�� �orthfield�� MN (forthcoming); and “Ars Divina”: Kierkegaard�s Conception of Christian Poetic Living, Ph.D. Thesis, Emory University, Atlanta 2001. See also Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard�s Existential Aesthetics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press 1994; Ettore Rocca, “Kierkegaards teologiske æstetik: Om troens perception,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 23, 2004, pp. 76-95; Ettore Rocca, “Kierkegaard’s Second Aesthetics,” Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook, 1999, pp. 278-92; George Pattison, Kierkegaard, the Aesthetic and the Religious: From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image, 2nd ed., London: SCM 1999 [1992]; George Pattison, “Kierkegaard and the Sublime,” Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook, 1998,
capacity to bring the uncanny out of the familiar. At the same time, he embraced Tieck’s views on allegory and storytelling. Indeed, Kierkegaard came to see Tieck as a source of methodological inspiration, a master aesthetician who could help him to sharpen his own natural wit, penchant for irony, sense of the uncanny, and gift for storytelling. For Kierkegaard, then, Tieck was ultimately a mentoring spirit who helped him to develop his own self-appointed role as Socratic gad��y and jesting troubadour of Danish Christendom.
