HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
poetry, preferred to read Heine in the French proseversion
approved by the German poet than in the
English verse-translations available to him.
The Irish writer Coulson Kernahan remained
loyal to Heine for more than half a century. A gap
of fifty-four years separated his first article, which
appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine of September,
1886, under the title "Some Aspects of Heine,"
and his second article, which appeared in the Dublin
Review of January, 1940, under the title "Wilde
and Heine." Kernahan's approach was at first that
of the Victorians. He followed in the footsteps of
Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Emma Lazarus.
As a friend of Oscar Wilde, he found much
similarity between the life and ideas of the German
exile who died in Paris in the year Wilde was
born and the no less tempestuous life and no less
iconoclastic ideas of this Irish poet who also ended
his days as a Parisian exile. If Wilde was a creature
of moods and moments, delighting and outraging
readers because of his paradoxical behavior and utterances,
Heine, his Continental predecessor, mirrored
to an even greater extent the antithetical crosscurrents
that swept through the modern soul. "He
is by turns a Greek and a Jew, a German and a
Frenchman, a moralist and a libertine, a poet and
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