This study explores Heine's complex reading of Byron and demonstrates the inadequacy of the notion of world-weariness (Weltschmerz) as a dominant paradigm for comparing these two writers. On the basis of comprehensive textual analysis, Alexandra Böhm suggests that between 1815 and 1930, during the threshold period between Romanticism and Realism, both Byron and Heine developed a poetics of intervening art (Poetik eingreifender Kunst). This performative poetics not only casts Heine's reading of Byron in a new light but also serves to more precisely situate the relationship of both of these writers to Romantic positions.

Alexandra Böhm, Universität Erlangen.