„So wollen wir leben und reisen!“ New Lights on the Wandering Poem around 1800 and Beyond

Abstract

“So wollen wir leben und reisen!” (So, let us live and travel!) is the last line of the poem “Werstpfähle, Von Dörpt nach Riga und weiter” (“Milestones, from Tartu to Riga and beyond”), written in 1812 by Casimir Ulrich Boehlendorff (1755–1825) from Courland, now part of Latvia. I begin my article with Boehlendorff’s poem for several reasons. First, last year (2025) marked the 250th anniversary of his birth and the 200th anniversary of his death. Second, I want to draw attention to a poet who, though writing in German, lived and worked outside Europe’s literary centres and therefore did not receive the recognition his work merited, a fate shared by many talented poets from the so-called ‘periphery’ of European literature, especially those from ‘small’ literatures, whose poems often remain accessible only through translation. Third, because of an interesting historical parallel in Estonian literature: seven years after Boehlendorff ’s journey from Tartu to Riga, which is the subject of the aforementioned poem, in June 1819, Estonian poet Kristian Jaak Peterson (1801–1822) walked the same route on foot. And fourth, Boehlendorff ’s poem offers an excellent starting point for a discussion of the phenomenon of ‘wandering poetry’ (Wanderlyrik, Reiselyrik, ambulante Poesie).

In Boehlendorff’s time, around 1800, wandering poetry – poems that invite the reader to wander, thematise wandering and are written while wandering – was in vogue. Poets, sons of the Muses, went on journeys into the great outdoors and recorded their wanderings in verse. Wandering had become a new way of discovering both the external world and the inner self. Boehlendorff was such a romantic wanderer, “a vagabond, who wanders the world and describes his wanderings in verse. In fifteen years, he has walked some twenty thousand miles”, as the Russian poet Vassily Zhukovsky wrote to Alexander Turgenev in 1817.

This paper will address the following questions: What are the possibilities of depicting such a linear and narrative (epic) activity as wandering in poetry? What exactly does ‘wandering poetry’ mean? What did it mean in Romanticism, and what are the lyrical representations of wandering in the 20th century, when the ‘wandering’ was often a forced journey, a journey into exile, displacement or banishment? Drawing on Boehlendorff’s poetry, I will point to three modes of expressing wandering in Romantic poems. I will give examples from both large and small literatures.