The Tribe of Harry: Heine and Contemporary Poetry

Ben Jonson’s ‘An Epistle answering to One that asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben’ acknowledges that, for the poet’s followers, membership of the tribe (who were also known as the Sons of Ben) came to signify a certain set of aesthetic commitments, to convivial wit and to the plain style—and, in the poem which commemorates their solidarity, to a certain degree of resistance to ‘the animated porcelain of the court’. ¹ For a number of reasons a tribe of Harry Heine provides an appropriate term with which to assess Heine’s poetic posterity. The Romanzero poem ‘Jehuda ben Halevy’ shows the extent to which the fate of poetry, in its transmission to subsequent generations, is an important issue for Heine himself Just as Heine’s reverence, in that poem, for the Jewish poets of medieval Spain amounts to a self-definition as their modern avatar, so too among contemporary poets Heine will prove to be more than a formal model for modern appropriation. Secondly, the notion of a tribe of Harry raises the question of filiation in relation to Heine’s reception in the twentieth century. Karl Kraus’s polemic ‘Heine und die Folgen’ raised the question of his influence and of the consequences, for the status of literature and literary language, of sustained imitation by contemporaries. Because Heine’s style was itself derivative, Kraus argued, it can be infinitely replicated by ‘successors’ who in fact anticipate their supposed model: ‘Hier ist ein Original, dem verloren geht, was es an andere hergab. Und ist denn ein Original eines, dessen Nachahmer besser sind?’ ² In Kraus’s understanding, Heine’s work actually destroys the possibility of tradition by allowing the reified structures of the commodity to gain access to the aesthetic.