Marx's poetic unconscious : secrecy, literature, and the political

For a brief period in his youth, while away from home for the first time, studying at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, Karl Marx imagined that he might become a poet. By 1836, the year he turned eighteen, he had filled three albums or personal notebooks with verse - largely juvenile love poems addressed to his future wife Jenny von Westphalen, with whom he was already completely smitten. Strange as it might seem, it appears Marx sent some of these attempts to his father as well. For in an extended, pedantic letter written during the early months of 1836, Heinrich Marx went out of his way to discourage his son from endeavoring to publish them. 'You would do well to wait before going into print', he cautioned. 'A poet, a writer, must nowadays have the calling to provide something sound if he wants to appear in public'. The paternal counsel continues a little later in the same missive: 'I tell you frankly, I am profoundly pleased at your aptitudes and I expect much of them, but it would grieve me to see you make your appearance as an ordinary poetaster; it should be enough for you to give delight to those immediately around you in the family circle'.