Madame de Staël’s visit to Weimar, the capital of German classicist culture, forms a significant encounter in the early history of cross-national appreciation, with insightful perspectives on entrenched French and German poetic positions and far-reaching ramifications for a subsequent re-evaluation of European cultural affairs. The core of the visit consisted of her meetings with Goethe (and Friedrich Schiller), an extraordinary sequence of events, because a lady of the world (“Weltfrau”, Goethe,
Annalen“1804”, manuscript 1822, published in 1830) and a world power in her own right got acquainted with the famous German poet. Indeed, to use Thomas Carlyle’s phrase, their encounter “rises beautifully in the imagination” (see his 1832 essay “Schiller, Goethe, and De…
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Citation: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. "Madame de Staël in Goethe's Weimar 1803-04". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 November 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=13890, accessed 21 November 2024.]
