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Updated: June 20, 2025
No attempt, however, has as yet been made at even an eclectic edition of his numerous finished works, a few of which are still unpublished, many of which are now rare. As to his standing with his literary contemporaries, Eichendorff admitted that Loeben influenced him as a man and as a poet; it was he who induced Eichendorff to write some of his earlier works under the pen-name of "Florens."
And when this is the case, posterity, lay and initiated, forgets their names and concerns itself in no wise with their records, unless it be for statistical purposes. It is to the latter class that Graf von Loeben belongs. For twenty-five years he was a perpetual, loyal, chivalric contestant in the Olympic vale of poetry.
To emphasize his works for their own sake would consequently be to set up false values. Loeben can be studied with profit only by those people who believe that great poets can be better understood and appreciated by a study of the literary than by a study of the economic background.
That Loeben has been so totally neglected by historians and encyclopedists is simply a case of that disproportion that so frequently characterizes general treatises. Loeben is entitled to some space in large works on German literature; but he was, like many another who has been given space, a weak poet.
Alas for German romanticism if this story were wholly typical of it! It contains the traditional conceits of the orthodox romanticists, but applied in such a sweet, lovely, pretty fashion! One woman is placed between two men, for in that way Loeben could best bring out his philosophy of friendship.
This much, however, is irrefutable: even if Heine knew in 1823 the five Loreleidichtungen, that had then been written, those by Brentano, Niklas Vogt, Eichendorff, Schreiber, and Loeben, and if he borrowed what he needed from all of them, he borrowed more from Schreiber than from the other four combined. Whore Brentano sowed, many have reaped.
But be his poems never so good, there is no reason why Loeben should be revived for the general reader. His prose works lack artistic measure and objective plausibility; his lyrics lack clarity and virility; his creations in general lack the story-telling property that holds attention and the human-interest touches that move the soul.
And what is more significant, it contains two important events that are not found in any of the other versions of the saga: the scene with the wine-growers and the story of the castaway ring. The latter is an old theme, but that they both occur in Loeben and in Geibel would argue that the latter took them from the former.
But the name Loreley does occur twice on the same page on which the last strophe of the ballad is published in Urania, and here the ballad is not entitled "Der Lurleifels," but simply "Loreley." Now, even granting that Loeben entitled his ballad one way in the MS and Brockhaus published it in another way in Urania, it is wholly improbable that Heine saw Loeben's MS previous to 1823.
But it is only an approach; and it does not make one feel inclined to read a vast deal more of the prose works of Graf von Loeben.
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