ABSTRACT
Wine poems are not just poems about wine. The drinking song and the dithyrambic ode are both poetic forms originating from the ancient Greek skolia, celebratory songs recounting the adventures of the wine god Dionysus and sung at banquets, or symposia. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries poets associated with the Romantic movement in both England and Germany produced wine poems, making use particularly of the drinking song and dithyrambic ode form as a vehicle for their explorations of wine imagery and intoxication. The English and German poets both reference their Greek predecessors, employ Greek metres and use classical imagery of intoxication such as Dionysus and the rivers Lethe (signifying forgetfulness) and Styx (the river to the underworld, signifying death). But they use their common tools to different ends. Both are concerned with the nature of the poet, and the intoxication of wine functions as a metaphor for poetic inspiration – as it did in the ancient Greek odes of Pindar (Lissarrague 1990, 123). But the role of the poet is not the same in England and Germany. For English Romantics such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats the intoxication of wine represents the unstable but transcendental power of the poetic imagination, and is individualistic in character; their portrayals of wine-drinking are informed by increasing social concern around the effects of alcohol on the mind and body, and the development of a concept of addiction. The German Romantics draw on the communal nature of classical wine-drinking to envision a new, unified German nation in which poetry and wine are the foundations of fraternity.
