ABSTRACT
A vast corpus of lyric poetry could be assembled from within the resources of German romantic literature. This chapter concentrates attentions on the two most important poets of this 'outer circle', Adalbert von Chamisso and Ludwig Uhland, with a complementary glance at Wilhelm Muller. It appends a brief examination of the work of Johann Peter Hebel, one of Germany's foremost dialect-poets who, while not himself a romantic, does not seem totally out of place in this company. Chamisso writes in an expressive style, but not one which is enriched by the nuances and subtle undercurrents of the major romantic poets. Emil Staiger is justified in calling Tieck the inventor of romantic 'Stimmungskunst', but he was hardly its most effective practitioner. The best of Chamisso's narrative poems is Salas y Gomez, which tells the story of an imaginary castaway on the sun-scorched rock in the Pacific, near Easter Island, which gives the poem its name.
