Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard1

By Bruce H. Kirmmse

In his Poetics, Aristotle writes that

the poetÌs function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of
thing that might happen….The distinction between historian and poet is not in
the one writing prose and the other verse – you might put the work of Herodo-
tus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this,
that the one describes a thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that
might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import
than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas
those of history are singulars. 2
The general category we call “art” is what Aristotle called “poetry,”
which comes from the Greek word “poesis,” meaning “something
made,” which translates into Latin as “fiction.” Thus, art is fiction. And
thus, fiction has nothing necessarily in common with lying, but is simply
“something made.” Indeed, if Aristotle is right, “truth” is more likely
to be found in “fiction” – that is, in “poetry,” in art – because art depicts
universals, while history never gets beyond the singular, the particular,
and this is why “poetry is something more philosophic and of graver im-
port than history.”
But, for us, does “art” ever get to universals? DoesnÌt the artist – at
least the “modern,” post-Enlightenment artist – always stumble on the
limitations of his or her subjectivity? Baudelaire described art as “a
duel in which the artist cries out in fear before being vanquished.”3 For
us moderns, at any rate, the very strictures and structures of language it-
self render it impossible for the artist to break free of the single-occupan-
cy room in which he or she is imprisoned. Aristotle is wrong, then, at least

1 I am grateful to Margaret Hellman and Brian Sçderquist for their careful read-
ing of this essay and their helpful suggestions.
2 Aristotle Poetics, 9 (1451a1,38 – 1451b1,7), cited from The Complete Works of
Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press 1984, vol. 2, pp. 2322 – 2323 (my emphases).
3 Charles Baudelaire “Le ConfiteorÌ de lÌArtiste” [The ArtistÌs ÍConfiteorÌ] in
Paris Spleen, my translation.

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50 Bruce H. Kirmmse

to the extent that we have no actual art that fulfills his criteria of univer-
sality. Aristotle is wrong for us, because we are no longer capable of imag-
ining the world and our possible knowledge of it as he did. Modernity
began with the collapse of metaphysics. With the end of the Enlighten-
ment and the foundering of its project – culminating in German idealism4
– of establishing the primacy of universal Reason, we have lost the ability
to see the world as a whole into which the individual can be understood to
fit without remainder. Aristotle assumed that everyone, every particular,
wanted to find his or her place in the whole, the universal. Our more
modest assumption is that every human subject would like to escape its
hermetic subjectivity; the problem is, every one of us is “vanquished”
in the attempt to do so.
If this is the case with respect to art, then history, for all its inability to
grasp universals, would at least be spared the embarrassment of being the
only discipline consigned to the realm of particulars, and Herodotus,
though unphilosophic, would at least not have to occupy a place inferior
to that of Sophocles. And perhaps there might be a place of special honor
for that “philosophic” branch of history that takes as its subject the
chronicle of human attempts through art – including the arts we call phi-
losophy and religion – to escape the confines of our particularity. Since all
such attempts end in failure, such a history would of course be a history of
failures. But such a history would also be interesting because it would
chronicle, over time and in relation to varying cultural contexts, the sub-
jectÌs attempt to be more than an isolated particular, and it is in such at-
tempts, I believe, that the dignity of the human species consists. And the
chronicling of such attempts – that is, the history of “art,” of poesis in the
broadest sense – is the highest calling of history. It gives history the right
to call itself a humanity.
Before we go on, one point should be made clear: “history,” of course,
is not what “really happened.” Today, the empiricist von RankeÌs notion
of presenting a past event “wie es eigentlich gewesen war” (as it really
was) strikes us as very na€ve, just as, on the other hand, HegelÌs claim
to present the underlying “Idea” of history strikes us as hubristic. History
is not what happened, itÌs what historians write. But this does not make
our discipline utterly relativistic, because we write away from inadequate
and one-sided versions of things, which fail to take into account various

4 By German idealism, I mean principally Kant and Hegel, though I suppose one
could say that Marx was the final Enlightenment cadaver to arrive; it showed up
only about 15 or 20 years ago, and itÌs still lying in the morgue, unclaimed.

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 51

sorts of source materials, and toward more inclusive accounts. Historians

progress in how they describe and explain the past, but their progress is
not a moving toward some final, “objective” account of how things “really
were” but a continual taking leave of less satisfactory accounts. So Aris-
totle was right about one thing: “history” does not reach the universal.
But of course, for us, neither does “poetry.” And since history is what
we write – that is, history is our creative (if doomed) efforts to rise to
an overall understanding of the human story – we historians are writers,
too. Indeed, in the original sense of the term, we historians are “poets.”
The present essay will make a “particular” study of Søren Kierke-
gaard in order to illustrate the delights and limitations of pursuing the his-
torianÌs craft – which is to be a writer in this age, attempting to make sense
of oneself and oneÌs times in relation to other selves and times.
Even though he is usually classified as a philosopher and theologian, I
call Kierkegaard a “writer,” first of all, because most of what he wrote
could be called “literature,” that is, fiction in the everyday sense of the
term. But his work was also “fiction” in the broader (and proper) sense
in which I used the term earlier – “something made” – and this makes
Kierkegaard a writer in the same sense in which historians are writers.
In AristotleÌs terms, Kierkegaard was a “poet,” which is also how he re-
ferred to himself: “en Digter” (a poet). And like all writers – like all of us
practitioners of poesis, all of us artificers and fabricators, who hope by our
work to be able to see beyond the self to the whole – Kierkegaard not
only wrote books, he wrote himself in order to make sense of himself.
Now, Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) was what is often called a “late
Romantic” writer. He wrote in the wake of the Enlightenment and the
last great attempts to view the whole with the eye of Reason, assimilating
the particular to the universal while doing justice to both. When Kierke-
gaard was born, Kant had been dead for nine years. Hegel died when
Kierkegaard was only 18, Goethe a year later. No other philosopher or
poet succeeded to their role as seers of the whole. Like others born a
bit too late to be real Romantics – and here, Flaubert and Baudelaire,
who were KierkegaardÌs juniors by eight years, come to mind – like
them, Kierkegaard wanted to realize the project of art, to capture the uni-
versal in the particular, but also, like them, he was constantly aware of the
impossibility of the project. The Romantic era marked the beginning of
modernity, when, on the one hand, the system of traditional, inherited so-
cial roles was radically disrupted, and on the other hand, increasing atten-
tion was being focused upon the self. KierkegaardÌs age was the age of the
discovery – some might say the “invention” – of the self. Not surprisingly,

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52 Bruce H. Kirmmse

it was also the great age of journals and diaries, and Kierkegaard, like his
American contemporary Henry David Thoreau, was one of historyÌs
great journal keepers. It is primarily in these incredibly voluminous jour-
nals and notebooks that we can see Kierkegaard trying to discover who
he was. And it is primarily from these journals that I have taken the ma-
terial for this essay.
Not unlike many others of his time (and, for that matter, before and
since), the two principal ways in which Kierkegaard attempted to rise
above his own particularity were by relating himself: 1) to another
human being, in love, and 2) to God. Both attempts failed, in my view,
because Kierkegaard was always reminded of the built-in limitations
that prevented his access to the reality of the “Other.” KierkegaardÌs
failed love affair with Regine Olsen and his (to say the least) problematic
attempts to relate to God were of a piece. (By contrast, one thinks of
Dante, who succeeded at the beginning of the 14th century where Kierke-
gaard, arguably, failed in the mid-19th. The “objective,” theocentric struc-
ture of DanteÌs universe allowed poetry to be enlisted in the service of
God. The “subjective,” egocentric structure of KierkegaardÌs universe –
and our own – enlists God in the service of poetry.) KierkegaardÌs writ-
ings make for painful, spectacular reading precisely because they were
pieces of writing that were limited – indeed, doomed – by the solipsism
of the pen and the seductive properties of language itself, by what Kier-
kegaard called “the Selbstsucht [egoism] of words.”5 (We will return to
this “Selbstsucht of words” later.) But all this does not make the histori-
anÌs exploration of the subject of the subject any less exhilarating and in-
structive.
Here is Kierkegaard in two of his earliest journal entries, wrestling
with the impossibility of reading a book, which turns out to be the impos-
sibility of escaping the self:
Most people approach the reading of a book with an idea of how they them-
selves would have written, how another has or would have written, etc.…This
is where the first possibility of not being able to read a book begins, which
then goes through innumerable nuances until at the highest level – misunder-
standing – the two most opposed kinds of readers meet: the most stupid and
those with the greatest genius, both of whom have in common that they were
unable to read a book.6

5 FF:34 in KJN 2, 75 / SKS 18, 82 (January 30, 1837).

6 AA:34 in KJN 1, 42 / SKS 17, 48 (1837).

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 53

And again, a thesis: great geniuses cannot really read a book; when they
read they always develop themselves more than they understand the author.7
Even if we are not “geniuses,” as Kierkegaard so accurately, if immodest-
ly, described himself, each of us, to use KierkegaardÌs term, is “encapsu-
lated,” every person is continually referred back to the self in which he or
she is immured, and no one ever really contacts anyone else. The great
20th-century English writer E. M. Forster made this the theme of his nov-
els. In the early, optimistic novel Maurice, the lonely hero leans out the
window into the darkness and calls “Come! Come!” And someone ac-
tually comes, leaping through the window! But in HowardÌs End, when
Forster has Mrs. Wilcox say “Only connect,” it is unfortunately the case
that no one really does. And by the time we arrive at ForsterÌs final
(and finest) novel, Passage to India, everyone has been encapsulated, con-
signed to his or her own cave, in an isolation that is not only interperso-
nal, but cosmic and theological: God “neglects to come,” Prof. Godbole
explains. “He refuses to come. I say to him, Come, come, come, come,
come, come. He neglects to come.”
But back to Kierkegaard: As all writing is reflexive, so is all reading
self-referential. What happened when Kierkegaard tried to read a book
was that the book made him “develop” himself, that is, write himself.
Thus KierkegaardÌs reading always directed him back to himself. Accord-
ing to Kierkegaard, when he or any other “great genius” – or, as I argue,
any of us – tries to read a book, what actually happens is that the book
reads him.
Of course, while aware of the fact that he himself was trapped within
himself and his writing, Kierkegaard, like most writers, was not above di-
recting his complaints regarding this at other writers. KierkegaardÌs first
book, From the Papers of One Still Living, published when was 25
years old, was a book-length book review, a rather scathing critique of
a contemporary writer – in fact the only other Dane (with the possible ex-
ceptions of Karen Blixen, Niels Bohr, and King Canute) whom most for-
eigners have heard of – namely, Hans Christian Andersen. Kierkegaard
was merciless in his critique of the Andersens of this world as “long-leg-
ged, puerile marionettes jumping about on the floor and riding hobby-
horses with the sweet young things,” telling tales of “innocent and
happy childhood.”8 No, Kierkegaard insisted, “What matters is to bring
the poetic to bear on their lives in every way, to exert a magical influen-

7 BB:46 in KJN 1, 131 / SKS 17, 136 (1837).

8 BB:37 in KJN 1, 122 / SKS 17, 128f. (1837).

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54 Bruce H. Kirmmse

ce…the poetic is not something to be consigned to certain hours and days

…[it does not consist of] tales Ífor children and childlike soulsÌ (poetic
mouthwash).”9 Why does AndersenÌs writing10 fall short, in KierkegaardÌs
view? AndersenÌs art fails to establish the proper relationship between
the particular aesthetic production and the universal, because, as Kierke-
gaard wrote, Andersen was always totally self-absorbed, “continually
thrust down into the funnel of his own personality.”11 AndersenÌs
works, Kierkegaard asserted, “can be seen less as his productions than
as amputations of his self.”12 These are harsh criticisms, and as we will
see, as with KierkegaardÌs reading praxis, KierkegaardÌs criticisms were
self-referential.
But it was not merely the vulnerable, insecure Andersen who was the
target of KierkegaardÌs criticism. Goethe, the undisputed ruler of the Par-
nassus of the early 19th century, was also roundly criticized. For one thing,
there was GoetheÌs moral conduct: As a young man he seduced Friede-
rike Brion, the lovely daughter of an Alsatian pastor. After an eleven-
month fling, Goethe simply ended the relationship when he left Stras-
bourg upon finishing his examinations; Friederike pined for him all her
life and never married. But it wasnÌt just that, it was the way Goethe
dealt with such things in his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung
und Wahrheit (From My Life: Poetry and Truth), where Goethe rational-
ized and “poetized” the affair. Kierkegaard writes that in Dichtung und
Wahrheit, Goethe “differs only in degree from a criminal, who also poet-
izes away the guilt, Ídistancing himself from it by poetizing it.Ì”13 Else-
where Kierkegaard described poets as “misunderstood” messengers of di-
vinity. The poet, Kierkegaard, wrote, ends up as “an unconscious sacrifice.
Goethe is less appealing because he is too conscious of himself to be a
sacrifice and not profound enough to want to be one.”14 The problem

9 BB:37 in KJN 1, 118 / SKS 17, 124 (1837).

10 KierkegaardÌs criticism is directed primarily at AndersenÌs novels, in particular
the novel Only a Fiddler (Kun en Spillemand), not not his fairy tales, which un-
deniably are great works of art, though it is also true that the best of these tales
are those Andersen adapted from existing folk tales, while his original tales are
uneven in quality.
11 EPW, 73 / SKS 1, 28.
12 EPW, 84 / SKS 1, 38.
13 JJ:250.a in KJN 2, 202 / SKS 18, 220 (1844). The last portion, in quotation marks,
Kierkegaard cites from his own Stages on LifeÌs Way, see SLW, 154 / SKS 6, 145.
See the entire discussion of Dichtung und Wahrheit, SLW, 149 – 155 / SKS 6,
140 – 146.
14 Not6:13 in KJN 3, 191 / SKS 19, 196 (August 1841, Jutland travel diary).

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 55

with Goethe, and with all poets, had precisely to do with the relation of
Dichtung (poetry) to Wahrheit (truth). They keep saying they are aiming
at truth, but they always end by “poetizing” it, shading the truth to their
own advantage. The very act of writing about the self seems to turn the
self into a work of art. There is so much poetry in the poet that there
doesnÌt seem to be much truth. Poor Andersen! Poor Goethe! Poor Kier-
kegaard!
What was KierkegaardÌs view of his own relation, as a “poet,” to his
works, many of which were attributed to a panoply of pseudonyms such as
“Victor Eremita” (Victorious Hermit), “Johannes the Seducer,” “Vigilius
Hafniensis” (Copenhagen Watchman), “Johannes de silentio” (John of
Silence), “Johannes Climacus” (John of the Ladder), “Hilarius Bookbind-
er,” “Judge William,” and “Frater Taciturnus” (Silent Brother)? In 1844,
Kierkegaard attempted to let himself off the hook by asserting a bit of
“poetic” distance: “In general I always stand in a poetic relationship to
my books, which is why I am pseudonymous.”15 But in considering the
matter five years later, he admitted that this “poetizing” had its draw-
backs: “I also have this flaw: that I constantly accompany myself, poetiz-
ing, and then I demand of myself, almost despairingly, that I must act in
the character [of what I wrote].”16 True, a poet must not put himself into
his work to the point of “amputating” himself – as Kierkegaard had ac-
cused Andersen of doing – but he must at any rate stand behind what
he writes. What the poet writes must be real, and not a mere second-
hand depiction of an appearance; otherwise poetry is both seductive
and destructive. This was why Socrates distrusted poets, who merely pro-
duced appearances of appearances. KierkegaardÌs reflections on this in
1850 were rather self-critical, though he attempted to excuse himself:
IsnÌt it strange that in the Republic Plato wants to have “the poets” exiled from
the state, attacks “the poets” frequently – and yet was in fact a poet himself.…
This is reminiscent of Socrates, who himself actually was an ethicist and was
right in wanting to get rid of “the poet.” In the second generation (Plato) we
have come so far that Plato is the poet who wants to get rid of “the poet” –
he poetizes wanting to get rid of the poet, that is how far things have gone back-
ward.…I have always admitted that there is something of the poet in me, but I,
however, am struggling forward.17

15 JJ:227 in KJN 2, 196 / SKS 18, 213 (1844).

16 NB11:205 in SKS 22, 129 (1849).
17 NB17:35 in SKS 23, 187 (1850).

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56 Bruce H. Kirmmse

Kierkegaard was afraid that in his works he was merely “poetizing” the
universal he was supposed to instantiate, and that he was not actually
being the ethical as such. He constantly searched his soul concerning
the relation between his own aesthetic representation of the ideal and
the ethical task of actually being the ideal, which in his case meant
being a “Christian”:
Usually the hero or the ethical figure comes first, and then the poet. I wanted to
be both of them: at the same time that I needed “the poetÌs” peace and detach-
ment from life, and the peace of the thinker, at that same time I wanted, right in
the midst of reality, to be what was poetized and thought about.…Now every-
thing has fallen into place. I have to take a step backwards, away from wanting,
myself, to be what I portray, and so I have my task: I will emphasize Christianity
all the more strongly. I will be an unhappy lover with respect to myself being the
ideal Christian; therefore I am becoming its poet.18
But Kierkegaard was continually plagued with doubts about being just a
“poet” and failing actually to be the ideal, and a couple of years later he
reacted with irritation to the notion that anyone would want him to be
what he wrote about: “Everyone with but a little human common sense
will realize that it would give rise to ridiculous confusion if someone
wanted to make all the lines uttered by these poetized personalities
into my words.”19 To which one might be forgiven for replying, Well,
whose words are they, then?
This question of “whose words are they” is not only a question which
arose for Kierkegaard, and which arises for those who thread their way
through KierkegaardÌs unending labyrinth of accusations, self-accusa-
tions, and excuses – it also comes up in connection with one of the earliest
documents we have from KierkegaardÌs hand, a long, soul-searching
document in which the author spends page after page searching for his
“self,” his “I.” It is ostensibly a letter from Kierkegaard to the brother
of his brother-in-law, a man named P. W. Lund, who was a naturalist in
Brazil and with whom Kierkegaard thus could not converse, but to
whom he had to write his confessions on paper. The document was
long accepted as an outpouring straight from KierkegaardÌs youthful
soul to a highly respected family member, the earliest sign of Kierkegaard
becoming Kierkegaard. But then literary critics and historians began to
put the status of the “letter” in doubt: for one thing, it was never sent
to the recipient for whom it was supposedly intended; for another, the

18 NB10:200 in SKS 21, 367 (1849).

19 Pap. X 6 A 145, p. 202 (1851).

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 57

document itself, as well as other, related papers, seems as though it was in

fact written as part of an unfinished epistolary novel, a genre which was
very popular at the time. Here is an extract from this so-called letter. This
is Kierkegaard at the age of 22, supposedly agonizing over searching for
himself, but perhaps only agonizing over searching for a fictive version of
himself – though as it turned out, these two selves became indistinguish-
able:
What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do – how often, in thinking
one has got the very best hold on oneself, one finds one has embraced the clouds
instead of Juno.20…It is a question of understanding my own destiny, of seeing
what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is
truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.…What use
would it be to be able to propound the meaning of Christianity, to explain
many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and my life?…
[What] matters [is] not a mass of information. That will no doubt follow, but
then not in the guise of accidental accumulations or a succession of details
side by side without any system, without a focal point upon which all radii con-
verge. Such a focal point is something which I too have looked for.…What did I
find? Not my “I.”…One must first learn to know oneself before knowing any-
thing else (cmyhi seautom).21 Only when the person has understood himself,
and then sees the way forward on his path, does life acquire repose and mean-
ing; only then is he free of that irksome, fateful traveling companion – that lifeÌs
irony which appears in the sphere of knowledge and bids true knowing begin
with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing.22
The problem, of course, was that although God could create the world
from nothing – just as, for Socrates, knowing could begin with a not-
knowing – for Kierkegaard, who aspired to more than Socratic negativity,
it would prove difficult or impossible ever to leave behind his “irksome,
fateful traveling companion,” irony.
At times it even proved impossible for Kierkegaard to know whether
it was he himself who was speaking. While still a student at the university,
it often seemed to him as though he were mouthing someone elseÌs
thoughts, or perhaps that they were mouthing his:
I must say that I canÌt but wonder that Justinus Kerner (in his Dichtungen) is
able to look so amicably upon a phenomenon which from my very first experi-

20 A reference to the mythical king Ixion, whose attempt to rape Juno failed when
Zeus substituted a cloud that resembled Juno.
21 Gnothi seauton, Greek, “Know yourself.” Inscribed on the temple of Apollo at
Delphi and attributed to at least six sages, including Solon, Heraclitus, Thales,
Pythagoras, and Socrates.
22 AA:12 in KJN 1, 19 – 22 / SKS 17, 23 – 27.

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58 Bruce H. Kirmmse

ence of it has always struck me as so awful – a person saying exactly the same
thing as me. If I wanted to grasp it, it would end in the most confused and almost
commedia del lÌarte-like nonsense, the one beginning a sentence which the other
finishes, causing confusion as to who was speaking.23
That same year Kierkegaard recorded an even deeper sense of distress –
indeed, sympathetic illness – with respect to this sort of identity confu-
sion:
It is really unfortunate that as soon as you work something out, you yourself are
that thing. I recently told you24 about an idea for a Faust, and now I am begin-
ning to feel that it was myself that I described. Scarcely do I read or think about
an illness before I myself have it. Every time I want to say something, there is
someone who says it at that very moment. It is as though I were a doublethinker,
and my alter ego continually anticipated me. Or when I stand and talk, every-
body thinks it is someone else. So I can rightly ask the question that the book-
seller Soldin asked of his wife: “Rebecca, is that me talking?”25
Soldin was a bookseller in Copenhagen, reputed for his absentmindedness,
and this would not be the last time that Kierkegaard would invoke the image of
sympathetic illness in conjunction with the distracted merchant. In this same
year, still in his undergraduate days, Kierkegaard again wrote about secondhand
illness and the bookseller Soldin, though this time with contempt, for Kierke-
gaard now attributed these foibles to someone else:
[many people get] touched off by the least movement without being able to
persist in any definite impression. They are like those patients who always get a
slight case of whatever illness is going around. They are a class of people so nu-
merous that a sort of spiritual ventriloquism has established itself in the entire
society. You hear a confused sound. You hardly know whether it is you yourself
or someone else who is speaking and are easily tempted to say, as Soldin said:
“Rebecca, is that me talking?”26
Who is the butt of KierkegaardÌs criticism here? Are these really the fail-
ings of other people? In the earlier journal entry we saw that it was Kier-
kegaard who contracted whatever illness was going around, and that it
was Kierkegaard who was just like Soldin. Nor were the references to
poor Soldin confined to KierkegaardÌs student days. In On the Concept
of Anxiety, from 1844, Kierkegaard uses Soldin as an example of the ab-
sentmindedness of forgetting oneself while busily investigating the objec-
tive world in scientific fashion.27 Soldin makes another appearance in

23 DD:25 in KJN 1, 219 / SKS 17, 227f. (July 11, 1837).

24 Here, again, when we think we have a journal entry, we have what appears to be
material intended for an epistolary novel.
25 CC:15 in KJN 1, 196 / SKS 17, 205 (1837).
26 CC:25 in KJN 1, 200 / SKS 17, 209 (1836 – 1837).
27 CA, 51 / SKS 4, 351.

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 59

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in the chapter Kierkegaard titled “Be-

coming Subjective,” where the bookseller again serves as an example of
losing track of oneÌs self. 28 And several years later, in KierkegaardÌs
draft material for The Book on Adler, the stakes were raised even higher.
Adler was a pastor who believed he had received direct communications
from Jesus (and was sacked from the State Church for having said so),
and Kierkegaard was fascinated with AdlerÌs case because it raised ques-
tions about the possibility of hearing (and recognizing) the voice of God,
and thus also about the parallel possibility of permitting oneself to speak
with divine “authority.” Kierkegaard was particularly intrigued and
alarmed by the fact that Adler was not sure whether he was hearing
the voice of Jesus Christ or his own voice, and this brought Kierkegaard
to invoke the bookseller Soldin once again: “One comes to see with what
frivolousness…Adler associates with God and with Christ, engages, shall I
say, in chatter with them and even chatters to them, until finally he is all
at sea, like Soldin, who said to Rebecca: Is it I who am speaking?…or is it
– and alas, in connection with Adler the next clause will be – or is it
Christ?”29 Here we cannot help linking KierkegaardÌs invocation of Sol-
din in connection with Adler to his earlier mention of Soldin in the con-
text of “spiritual ventriloquism.” If Soldin cannot tell whether it is he or
someone else who is speaking, if Adler cannot tell if it is he or Christ who
is speaking, how can we expect Abraham to know whether it was he him-
self or God – or perhaps a demon – who told him to sacrifice Isaac? And
how can Kierkegaard – and by extension, how can any of us – know
whether we have heard the voice of God or our own voice projected
and reflected back to us? “Spiritual ventriloquism” is a powerful short-
hand way of alluding to the specter that haunted the post-Enlightenment,
post-Hegelian universe. This was a new universe in which Ludwig Feuer-
bach (whom Kierkegaard read with respect) had recently asserted that
Christianity indeed consisted of nothing but “spiritual ventriloquism,”
of projection: “theology is anthropology,” a postulate which famously
drew from Marx the additional comment that “religion is only the illusory
sun which revolves around man as long as man does not revolve around
himself.”30 Was Adler revolving around himself as Soldin had done? How

28 CUP1, 167 – 169 / SKS 7, 154 – 156.

29 BA, 281 / Pap. VII 2 B 235, p. 154 (1846 – 1847).
30 See Ludwig Feuerbach The Essence of Christianity (1841, trans. into English by
George Eliot) and Karl Marx “Contribution the the Critique of HegelÌs Philos-
ophy of Right: Introduction” (1843).

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60 Bruce H. Kirmmse

could Kierkegaard be sure that he was not revolving around himself ?

KierkegaardÌs concern about the dislocation of the self and his recurrent
references to the “spiritual ventriloquism” of Soldin reflected his own un-
certainty about “poetizing” Christianity, indeed, about poetizing the voice
of God Himself.
As soon as Kierkegaard began to write about anything, that thing
began to change because Kierkegaard began to “poetize”: “One thought
succeeds another. No sooner is it thought and I want to write it down,
than there is a new one: hold onto it, seize it, madness, insanity!”31
With some people, words have a way of their own, and they are subject
to “what I would call Íthe Selbstsucht [egoism] of words,Ì where one
word carries another along with it, where words that are often in each
otherÌs company seek one another out – something like what would hap-
pen if the words in a dictionary came alive and wanted to position them-
selves in the order to which they were accustomed.”32 So here again is the
“Selbstsucht of words: we try to write books, but books write us.
All this came to apply to Kierkegaard when he tried to come to terms
with the love he felt for his Beatrice, Regine Olsen, nine years his junior.
They became engaged when she was 18 and Kierkegaard was 27. The en-
gagement lasted 13 months, though, according to KierkegaardÌs own tes-
timony, only a few days after becoming engaged he felt sure that he had
made a mistake. At first he attributed the necessity of ending the engage-
ment to his own overwhelming melancholia; subsequently he added to
this the demands of his calling as a writer, and then the explanation
that he was engaged (Danish, for-lovet, literally “pre-promised”) to
God. From all available evidence, Regine Olsen appears to have been a
quite bright, though rather ordinary and unsophisticated young person.
Despite his willingness to allow the broken engagement to be portrayed
as if Regine had initiated the break-up – which would have spared her the
scandal that accompanied breach of promise in those days – Kierkegaard
appears to have treated Regine with almost unparalleled psychological
cruelty, for example, by including his final note, in which he definitively
broke off their engagement, word for word in the novel “ÍGuilty?Ì/ÌNot
Guilty?Ì” The only bright spot, if that is what it was, is that unlike
GoetheÌs Friederike Brion, for whom an 11-month engagement was
enough to last a lifetime, Regine Olsen, less than two years after the ter-
mination of her 13-month alliance with Kierkegaard, became engaged to

31 CC:21 in KJN 1, 198 / SKS 17, 207 (1836 – 1837).

32 FF:34 in KJN 2, 75 / SKS 18, 82 (January 30, 1837).

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 61

Johan Frederik Schlegel, a young jurist with very bright prospects; the en-
gagement culminated in their 59-year marriage. It must, however, also be
noted that almost immediately upon the death of Schlegel in 1896, Regine
was beset with journalists who wanted to hear her account of her engage-
ment to the now-famous author Kierkegaard. Regine Schlegel, by then a
very old woman, was happy to oblige, granting extensive interviews to
several curious biographers. Even more interesting in this connection is
the fact that when KierkegaardÌs papers were sorted out immediately
after his death, one of his journals was found to deal exclusively with
his relationship with Regine. This journal was believed to be of such a
personal nature that in 1856 it was turned over to Regine Schlegel,
then living in St. Croix in what were then the Danish West Indies (now
the U.S. Virgin Islands) of which her husband was governor. The journal
(which will be cited subsequently in the present essay) was entitled by
Kierkegaard “My Relationship to ÍherÌ…somewhat poetical,” and Regine
was free to do with it what she wished. She could have burned the journal
as she burned her letters to Kierkegaard, which were also returned to her
after KierkegaardÌs death. But she preserved it for nearly half a century,
and finally, in 1898, she had it deposited in the University of Copenhagen
Library, in a sealed package to be opened after her death, when, in ac-
cordance with her instructions, it was to be opened and published – ac-
companied by an introduction based on her conversations with university
librarian Raphael Meyer – under the title Kierkegaardian Papers: The
Engagement. Published for Mrs. Regine Schlegel by Raphael Meyer.33
Thus, despite her 59-year marriage to Schlegel, by the turn of the last cen-
tury Regine was only too happy to let herself be “poetized” by the man to
whom she had been engaged for a mere thirteen months sixty years ear-
lier. She was happy to let Kierkegaard carry her with him into history, be-
cause, as Kierkegaard promised, “she is to belong to history.”34 But only
the seducible are seduced. Only because Regine Olsen Schlegel, like all
of us moderns, was willing to poetize herself was she susceptible to
being poetized by Kierkegaard.
The more we read of his journals, the clearer it becomes that Kierke-
gaard could only “get a life” by making it into poetry and, via poetry, into

33 Kierkegaardske Papirer – Forlovelsen. Udgivne for Fru Regine Schlegel af

Raphael Meyer, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel 1904. Curiosity concern-
ing KierkegaardÌs relationship was so intense that a German edition of the work
appeared the following year.
34 LD, 337 / B&A 1, 264.

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62 Bruce H. Kirmmse

“history.” For Kierkegaard, “history” was neither what really happened

(as Ranke believed), nor was it what historians write (as we believe).
No, for Kierkegaard “history” was a sort of destination, a kind of immor-
tality in which one could be what one “really was” (though somewhat
poetical) – forever. Kierkegaard traded an actual love life for Dichtung,
but how much Wahrheit was in his own life? What was KierkegaardÌs
“melancholia”? Why was he unable to keep from “poetizing” his relation
to the woman he loved? Here is a journal entry from 1837, predating his
engagement to Regine Olsen by several years:
The other day I was in a strange mood. I sat sunken into myself (feeling like an
old ruin must feel), losing myself and my “I” in pantheistic dissolution, and I
read an old folk song…which tells of a girl who waited for her beloved one Sat-
urday evening, but he did not come – and she took to bed “and wept so bitterly.”
She got up again “and wept so bitterly.” And suddenly the scene opened before
me, I saw the Jutland heath with its indescribable loneliness and its solitary lark
– and then one generation after another rose before me, and all the girls sang for
me, and wept so bitterly, and sank into their graves again. And I myself wept
with them.35
And here is an entry from KierkegaardÌs journal four years later, in the
late autumn of 1841, when he had fled to Berlin in order to escape the
scandal and gossip that followed upon his abandonment of Regine in
October of that year – and in order to write his scandalous best-seller
Either/Or:
You say: she was beautiful. Oh, what do you know about that[?] I know, for this
beauty has cost me tears – I myself bought flowers to adorn her; I would have
decked her out with all the ornaments in the world, only, of course, so far as they
accentuated her loveliness – and then, when she stood there in her finery – I had
to leave – when her joyous, gay glance met mine – I had to leave – I went out
and wept bitterly.36
Two things immediately leap off the page. Here, once again, in a private
journal entry, apparently designed to be read by no one other than its au-
thor, Kierkegaard addresses a fictive “you” in what seems quite clearly to
be yet another effort in the genre of the epistolary novel. And the final
“wept bitterly” is a direct reference to the folk song he had mentioned
in his journal four years earlier. But it is also a reference to the Apostle
Peter, who in the Danish Bible, just as in the King James version and
NRSV, denied Christ three times before the cock crowed, and then
“wept bitterly.” One might even think that Kierkegaard orchestrated in

35 FF:156 in KJN 2, 96 / SKS 18,104f. (December 30, 1837).

36 Not8:4 in KJN 3, 222 / SKS 19, 226 (November 1841, Berlin diary).

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 63

advance his own betrayal of Regine – despite repeated assurances that he

would be hers forever – that he abandoned her in order that he could
“weep bitterly” like the girl in the folk song who was betrayed, or like
St. Peter, who was the betrayer. With a writer like Kierkegaard – or
like any of us moderns – there is no way to establish a boundary between
the most personal true confession and “poetry”: “Dichtung” is “Wahr-
heit.”
In the Berlin diary that Kierkegaard kept that autumn after the
breakup, he seems quite clear about this blurred boundary between poet-
ry and truth. The first page of the journal gives the volumeÌs title and sub-
title. Title: “De vita. E vita.” [About a life. From a life.]. Subtitle: “Poetic
attempts.”37 In other words, “Life poetized.” A few pages later in the
same journal, Kierkegaard expresses regret that he has been unsuccessful
in truly “poetizing” Regine out of his life: “I cannot be quit of this rela-
tionship, for I cannot poetize it; the moment I want to poetize it, I am im-
mediately possessed by an anxiety.”38 A letter Kierkegaard wrote that au-
tumn – this one apparently actually sent – to his best friend, Emil Boesen,
echoed the same thought:
I do not poetize her, I do not bring her to mind but call myself to account. This is
my boundary. I can poetize everything, so I believe, but where it is a matter of
duty, obligation, responsibility, guilt, etc., there I will not and cannot poetize. If
she had canceled the connection with me, yes, then my soul would have soon
driven the plow of forgetfulness over her; she would have served me as did oth-
ers before her – but now I serve her.39
In that same journal from the autumn of 1841, Kierkegaard again ex-
presses his impatience at being unable to free himself from his relation-
ship with Regine via poetry:
Yes – if it were she who had broken off with me, it would have been easy for me
to forget her, no matter how much I had loved her. I would have dared to crowd
sail in order to forget her; I would have dared to poetize her – but now I cannot
persuade myself to do so.40

37 Not8:1 in KJN 3, 219 / SKS 19, 223 (late October–late December 1841, Berlin
diary).
38 Not8:18 in KJN 3, 225 / SKS 19, 230 (late October–late December 1841, Berlin
diary).
39 LD, 93 / B&A 1, 74 (November 16, 1841, letter from Berlin to Emil Boesen) (my
emphasis).
40 Not8:30 in KJN 3, 229 / SKS 19, 234 (late October–late December 1841, Berlin
diary).

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64 Bruce H. Kirmmse

But never fear, a brilliant and imaginative writer like Kierkegaard could
always find a way to turn truth into poetry. It just took a couple of years.
Here is a journal entry from May of 1843, when Stages on LifeÌs Way, the
enormous sequel to Either/Or, was in gestation:
Had I had faith, I would have stayed with Regine. Praise and thanks be to God, I
have now understood it. I have been on the point of losing my mind these days.
Humanly speaking I have done the right thing for her; perhaps I should never
have become engaged, but from that moment on I treated her chivalrously. In
an aesthetic and chivalrous sense, I loved her far more than she loved me, for
otherwise she would neither have acted proudly toward me nor alarmed me
later with her scream. So I have just begun a story entitled “Guilty/Not Guilty”;
of course it might contain things that would amaze the world, for in the last year
and a half I have lived more poetry within myself than all novels put together.
But I cannot and will not – my relationship to her must not be poetically dissi-
pated. It has a quite different reality.…As God is my witness, [to have married
Regine] was my only wish. God is my witness that I have kept watch over myself
lest any forgetfulness efface her memory.41
But what actually happened was that Regine OlsenÌs “reality” was indeed
“poetically dissipated” by her incorporation in the novel “ÍGuiltyÌ/ÌNot
Guilty?,Ì “ which formed a part of Stages on LifeÌs Way, published in
1845, and which included, as previously noted, the actual letter in which
Kierkegaard definitively broke off his engagement to Regine. This
seems to have done the trick, though perhaps there was also the cumula-
tive weight of KierkegaardÌs earlier presentations, including his dissection
of their engagement in the harrowing “SeducerÌs Diary,” which constitut-
ed a large portion of Either/Or; his allegorical presentation of their rela-
tionship in Fear and Trembling, in which the biblical AbrahamÌs willing-
ness to sacrifice his son Isaac could be seen as a parallel to KierkegaardÌs
willingness to sacrifice his engagement to Regine; and the melancholy
version presented in Repetition – all of which were published in 1843.
If God was KierkegaardÌs witness, then it would have been well for
God to watch out, because, as we will see, Kierkegaard tended toward
doing to God precisely what he had done to Regine Olsen: poetize
Him out of his reality.
Some years later, in 1849, Kierkegaard again attempted to write an
account of his love affair with Regine, this time in a notebook dedicated
solely to their relationship. This was the same notebook mentioned earli-
er, the one sent to Regine after KierkegaardÌs death, which she carefully
preserved and had published so that she could “belong to history.” It will

41 JJ:115 in KJN 2, 164 – 165 / SKS 18, 177 – 179 (May 17, 1843).

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 65

be remembered that first page of the notebook bears the title: “My Re-
lationship to Íher.Ì…somewhat poetical.”42 Kierkegaard put “her” in quo-
tation marks. This says it all: Regine had become “her” in quotation
marks, and no matter how Kierkegaard tried, whatever he said about
“her” turned out to be “somewhat poetical,” just as, earlier, the journal
entitled “De vita. E vita.” (About a life. From a life.) had borne the sub-
title “Poetical attempts.” Here, in the culminating notebook about Kier-
kegaardÌs relationship with “her,” is KierkegaardÌs description of “her”:
“Lovely she was, when first I saw her; lovely, in truth lovely, in her devo-
tion; moving, in a noble sense moving, in her sorrow; not without sublim-
ity at the final moment of the separation; childlike first and last…” What
is interesting here is precisely the “poetic dissipation” of Regine. A care-
ful examination of the manuscript pages shows that in place of the open-
ing words as they now stand – “Lovely she was, when first I saw her” –
Kierkegaard had originally written, “She was lovely the first time I saw
her.” How boring, how prosaic. Then, having found the right “poetizing”
tone, Kierkegaard continued, calling her “lovely, in truth lovely,” and
then he came to the final paragraph of his paean, which begins “Lovely
she was” and ends with the words “our own dear, little Regine.” 43
Love had been poetized. There was plenty of Dichtung, but it is hard
to say how much Wahrheit was in it.
And as already mentioned, it appears that not only Regine, but God,
too, was poetized by the writer. In an unused draft for one of the opening
“attunements” of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard includes an unsettling
retelling of the biblical story of AbrahamÌs near-sacrifice of Isaac:
Let us suppose – something unreported in both the Old Testament and the
Koran – that Isaac knew that the purpose of the journey to Mount Moriah
was that he was to be sacrificed. Now if there was a poet among my contempo-
raries, he would be able to recount what these two men said along the way. I
imagine that Abraham first looked upon [Isaac] with all his fatherly love; his
venerable countenance and his broken heart made his speech more urgent; he
let [Isaac] understand that as a father he was suffering even more because of
it. – But it did not help. Then I imagine that Abraham turned away from him
for a moment, and when he turned back again, he was unrecognizable to
Isaac. His eyes were wild. His countenance was chilling. The venerable locks
of his hair bristled like furies above his head. He seized Isaac by the breast.
He drew the knife. He said: “You thought it was for the sake of God that I
was going to do this. You were wrong. I am an idolater. This desire has again
awakened in my soul. I want to murder you. It is my desire. I am worse than

42 Not15:1 in KJN 3, 429 / SKS 19, 431 (August 24, 1849).

43 Not15:14 in KJN 3, 443 – 444 / SKS 19, 443f. (August–November 1849).

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66 Bruce H. Kirmmse

any cannibal. Despair, you foolish boy, who imagined that I was your father. I
am your murderer, and this is my desire.” And Isaac fell to his knees and
cried out to Heaven: [“]Merciful God, have mercy upon me.[“] But then Abra-
ham said to himself quite softly, “This is how it must be, for it is better, after all,
that he believes that I am a monster, that he curses me and the fact that I was his
father, and yet still prays to God – than that he should know that it was God who
imposed the test. For then he would lose his mind and perhaps curse God.” –
But where, after all [Kierkegaard concludes], is the contemporary poet who
has a sense for such collisions?44
There are three characters in this imagined version of the Abraham-Isaac
story: IsaacÌs faith may have been saved by this hideous ploy of his fa-
therÌs, but what about AbrahamÌs faith? And even more, what about
the putative faith of the “contemporary poet” Kierkegaard, who was
quite proud that it was he who had “a sense for such collisions?” What
is the state of the person who “poetized” this story? What makes the
tale so chilling is not only when the reader imagines himself or herself
in the place of Abraham or Isaac, but – especially – when one imagines
oneself in the place of its author, who was not, in fact, “Johannes de silen-
tio” but Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. How could he have written this?
And a brief aside from this author: In our post-metaphysical age we
no longer have the stomach for the classical or biblical worldviews, or
even for those of Kant or Hegel. Unlike laughing Isaac or strong-born
Iphigenia, we, like Baudelaire, cry out in fear before we are vanquished,
and what is lost is not the artistÌs life, but his or her faith, because we are
no longer capable of seeing a world in which the particular can be under-
stood in harmony with the universal.
Finally, here is another religious hypothetical from Kierkegaard, here
replying to words he puts in the mouth of a “scoffer”:
Do you think that your sorrow is so awful that your life should refute what has
hitherto been held as the truth: namely, that God cares for every human being
with a fatherly concern…[?] Bear in mind that, in that case, the eternal law in
the realm of the spirit – which is more beautiful and mightier than the law which
in nature holds the heavenly bodies on their appointed and measured course –
[that, in that case, the eternal law] would be annulled; then everything would
collapse in despair more terribly than if the heavenly bodies were to collapse
in fearful confusion. If this were the truth, if you really were this so special
one in the human race who could say such things in truth – I am no coward,
but I would nevertheless say to you: Hide away from human beings, hide
your wisdom, let people live in the beautiful belief in a fatherly Providence.

44 JJ:87 in KJN 2, 154 – 155 / SKS 18, 166 – 168 (1843), my italics.

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 Poetry, History – and Kierkegaard 67

But it is not so, and I donÌt have to ask you to leave; rather, I say: Come forth
and proclaim your high-flying wisdom, IÌm not afraid.45
This sounds like the draft of a sermon, and Kierkegaard does try to end
the passage on an upbeat note, but there is something forced about it. The
“high-flying wisdom” of which Kierkegaard here claims to be unafraid
has the same message as that proclaimed by Abraham, who in his effort
to save his sonÌs faith (though not his own!) lost the faith that “God cares
for every human being with a fatherly concern,” thus annulling “the eter-
nal law in the realm of the spirit” and causing “everything to collapse in
despair.” Kierkegaard says he is “not afraid” of this message, but I have
my doubts. He was the one who “poetized” into AbrahamÌs mouth the
passage we examined earlier, just as he is the one who “poetizes” it
into the scofferÌs mouth here. And, indeed, the entire notebook in
which this entry appears is the same Berlin diary we have already looked
at several times, the diary bearing the heading “De vita. E vita. [About a
life. From a life.] Poetic attempts.” It seems impossible in principle to
tease apart the views of “the poet” from “life” itself.
To conclude, Kierkegaard found it impossible to talk about his love
for Regine or about God without “poetizing.” He could not keep the
thing conceived (loved, worshiped, feared) separate from himself, the
self which was conceiving it. Not only for Goethe, but for Kierkegaard
and for the rest of us, it has proven impossible for the post-Enlightenment
human self to separate concrete, actual “life” – what Aristotle called “his-
tory” and what Goethe called “truth” – from “poetry,” that is, from the
processed or “made” product of experience that we call “art.” Our
post-Enlightenment worldview remains essentially that of Kierkegaard.
We share with Kierkegaard the impossibility of inhabiting the worldview
of either classical or Enlightenment metaphysics. For us, as for Kierke-
gaard, it is impossible to see the actual, the particular – what Aristotle
terms “history” – as subordinated to and intelligibly subsumed within
the universal. We moderns know that, like it or not, we are trapped in
the house of language. As Kierkegaard has taught us – and I cannot
think of anyone who could possibly teach us better – as soon as we at-
tempt to re-flect (bend back upon) or speculate (spy out, mirror upon)
ourselves, and especially upon our relation to God (or to our beloved,
for that matter), we begin to fabricate and even fabulate – we begin to
“poetize.” And in our poetry, we find the humanity that we moderns

45 Not8:47 in KJN 3, 235 / SKS 19, 241 (late October–late December 1841, Berlin
diary).

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68 Bruce H. Kirmmse

share with one another and with one of the greatest of our teachers, the
poet Søren Kierkegaard.

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