Christoph Wieland, Fragments of Psyche, 1767

Romantic readings of Cupid and Psyche were not limited to the English speaking environment. This poem is ‘fragments of Psyche’, an early, incomplete work by the German romantic poet, dramatist and novelist Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813). During the same period in which he drafted this incomplete poem, he also wrote the Bildungsroman (‘novel of development’) Geschichte des Agathon (The Story of Agathon, 1766-7), in which he describes his own personal development, but disguises this very thinly by setting the novel in the historical context of the 5th and 4th century BC. Fictional biographies continue to appear in the wake of engagement with Apuleius’ fiction.

This poetic fragment has a frame set in the same time period as Agathon: the story of Psyche is told to Aspasia, a romantic high priestess, by her Platonic lover Alkahest, a handsome young Zoroastrian magician, on a number of summer evenings. The story itself is coloured by its Platonist and philosophical context, and very freely adapted from Apuleius. For example, the goddess Isis, who plays a major role in the last book of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, is Psyche’s creator.
 

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