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From a lecture



You summoned me to speak to you about a poet of our times, or about a few poets, or about poetry in general. You must therefore presumably happy to listen to what I am happy to talk about; we are all young, and so it appears that there’s nothing more pleasant and innocuous. I don’t think it would be very difficult for me to put together a few hundred adjectives and verbs that would provide you with fifteen minutes of amusement; I believe this mostly because I know that we’re all young and I have a good sense of which tune you like to dance to. It’s rather easy to ingratiate oneself in the company of one’s peers. “We” is a beautiful word, the lands of our fellow citizens unfold like vast backdrops stretching to the seas, even to the stars, and beneath our feet lie the yesteryears, layered in transparent abysses like prisoners in confinement. And speaking of the poetry of the present, there are several varieties that are agreeable but deceptive. And those of you in this room are especially used to hearing talk about the arts. You have an unbelievable number of keywords and names in your heads, and they all mean something to you. You’ve come so far that you don’t dislike anything anymore. However, I would have to hide from you the fact that most of those names mean nothing to me, absolutely nothing; that not even the smallest part of what these names signify satisfies me in any way. I would have to hide from you the fact that I have come to believe, in all seriousness, that one should hardly speak about the arts at all, that they can scarcely be spoken about at all, that it is only the insignificant and meaningless aspects of the arts which do not, by their silent nature, elude discourse entirely, and that the further one delved into the innermost depths of the arts, the more silent one becomes. So I would have to hide from you the great difference in our way of thinking. But the spring outside and the city we live in, with its many churches and many gardens and many kinds of people, and that strange, deceitful, ever-assenting element of life would come to my aid with so many colorful veils that you would believe I had made a sacrifice with you, when I in fact sacrificed myself against you, and you would praise me for it.

         On the other hand, I don’t think it would be all that difficult for me to place myself, quite unexpectedly and even entertainingly, in contrast to your tastes and aesthetic habits. But whether you would greet the sentences in which I might attempt to lay such things out with the smile of the augers and the seasons feuilleton reader, or whether you would listen to me with restrained aversion, in no case would I ingratiate myself by presuming I had been understood by you, in no case would I assume that you have received my view as anything other than formal and superficial. I would find myself attacked with arguments that don’t apply to me and shielded by arguments that don’t protect me. I would sometimes feel helpless like a child not yet of age, and other times as if I had outgrown all possibility of understanding, like a man grown too old, and all of this on my own ground, in the one area I may possibly understand something about. For a certain sense of good manners would prevent you from shifting the debate into neighboring territories such as history, anthropology or sociology, which are entirely closed to me due to my ignorance. Yet even on my own modest field, I would see you wielding heavy weapons against what I consider mere scarecrows, and I would see you serenely striding across the streams I believe to be lethally powerful, eternal, bottomless boundaries. But I would be the most suspicious if you were to agree with me, for then I would be doubly convinced that you had taken figuratively all that I had meat literally, or that some other form of misunderstanding had occurred.

         Any praise I could give to a poet would seem feeble to you: it would only thinly and faintly reverberate across a wide gulf of silence. Your critics and art juries, if they applaud, do so like water-spitting tritons: their praise is for fragments and parts, mine for the whole, their admiration for the relative, mine for the absolute.

         I suspect that the concept of the whole in art has been lost altogether. Nature and imitation have been fused into an uncanny hybrid, as in panoramas and waxwork cabinets. The idea of poetry has been reduced to that of an ornate confession. Certain words of Goethe’s are to blame for this enormous confusion, too subtly figurative to be correctly grasped by biographers and annotators. One recalls those perilous metaphors about the occasional poem and of “writing something off one’s chest.” I cannot think of anything more akin to panorama than the way in which Werther has been handled in the Goethe biographies, with those shameless declaration about how far the material of experience reaches and where the painted background begins. The disintegration of the spiritual in art has, in recent decades, been jointly promoted by philologists, journalists, and pseudo-poets. The fact that we no longer understand each other at all, that I find it harder to speak to you about a poet of your time and your language than an English traveler might be able tell you something about the customs and worldview of a foreign culture, this stems from of a profound heaviness and ugliness that many dust-devouring minds have brought into our culture.

         I wonder if, amidst all that tiresome chatter about individuality, style, disposition, mood and so on, you’ve lost the awareness that the material of poetry is in its words, that a poem is a weightless web of words that—through their arrangement, their sound and their content, their combination of the memory of the visible and the memory of the audible with the element of movement—evoke a precisely defined, dreamily clear, fleeting state of mind which we call Stimmung, mood. If you find your way back to this definition of the lightest of the arts, you will have cast off something like a confused burden of conscience. It is all in the words, the words with which one can evoke what has been seen and heard into a new existence and, according to inspired laws, present it as something in motion. There is no direct path from poetry to life, nor from life to poetry. The word as bearer of the lived substance of life and its dreamlike fraternal word (which may appear in a poem) diverge and pass by one another like strangers, like the two buckets in a well. No external law forbids art from all reasoning, all quarreling with life, every direct reference to life, and every direct imitation of life, but this simple impossibility does: these heavy things can no more live there than a cow can live in the treetops.

         “The value of poetry”—I borrow the words of an unknown but valuable author—“lies not in its meaning (for otherwise it would amount to wisdom or erudition), but in its form. By this I do not mean anything merely external, but rather that profoundly stirring quality in rhythm and sound by which, in all ages, the originators, the masters have distinguished themselves from their successors, the second-order artists. Furthermore, the value of a single poem is not determined by a single discovery in a line, stanza or larger section, however prodigious it may be. It is the composition as a whole—the relationship of the individual parts to one another, the necessary unfolding of one element to the next—that alone marks poetry of the highest order.”

I add two remarks that almost arise on their own:

The rhetorical, in which life appears as subject matter, and those reflections clothed in solemn language, have no claim to the name of poetry.

On what is ultimately decisive—the choice of words and how they must be placed (rhythm)—it is, in the end, the artist’s instinct and the listeners receptivity that must pass judgment.

This, which alone constitutes the essence of poetry, is the most misunderstood. In no artistic mode do I know of an element more disgracefuly neglected by modern German “poets” than the adjective. It is either carelessly inserted or employed with a deliberate garishness that paralyzes everything. Yet even worse is the deficiency of rhythmic sensibility. It seems that almost no one remembers that this is the lever of all poetic effect. It would be like placing a single poet above all others in recent last decades, if one could say of him: he has adjectives are not stillborn, and his rhythms never run counter to his will.

Every rhythm carries within itself the invisible line of the movement it can evoke; when rhythms grow rigid, the gesture of passion concealed within them becomes mere tradition, like the gestures that make up the ordinary, insignificant ballet.

I cannot truly comprehend those “personalities” that have no distinct tone of their own, whose inner movements conform to a incidental rhythm. I can no longer bear to hear their Uhlandian or Eichendorffian meters, and I envy no one who still can, for such a person much have coarse ears.

One’s own tone is everything; whoever does not maintain it forfeits the inner freedom that alone can makes a true work possible. The boldest and the strongest is the who can place his words with the greatest freedom; for there is nothing more difficult than to tear them from their fixed, false associations. A new and daring combination of words is the most wondrous gift to the soul, no less than a statue of the body Antinous, or a great vaulted gate.

Let us be artists in words, as others are in white and colored stone, in wrought bronze, in refined tones, or in dance. Let us be praised for our art, and rhetoricians for their conviction and force, philosophers for their wisdom, mystics for their illuminations. If one is in search of confessions, they are to be found in the memoirs of statesmen and men of letters, in the admissions of doctors, dancers and opium addicts. For those who cannot distinguish that material from the artistic, art simply does not exist—though there is certainly more than enough writing for them as well.

You are surprised by me. You are disappointed and feel that I am driving life out of poetry for you.

You are surprised that a poet should praise rules and see in the sequence of words and structure of meter the essence of poetry. But there are already too many dilettantes who praise intentions, and too many silver tongues exalting the disposable. But worry not: I will give that life back to you. I know what life has to do with art. I love life. Or rather: I love nothing but life. But I do not love it when one tries to fit ivory teeth into painted people or sets marble statues on the stone benches of a garden as if they were strolling passersby. You must rid yourself of the habit of demanding that someone write in red ink to make it seem like they are writing in blood.

I have spoken to you too much about effect and too little about soul. And yet, for I regard effect as the soul of art, as its soul and its body, its core and its shell, as its entire, complete being. If it did not produce an effect, I would know what purpose it serves. But if it produced that effect through life, through its merely material aspect, I likewise wouldn’t know what purpose it serves. It has been said that among the arts there is a perceptible striving to leave their own sphere of effect and to pursue the effects of a sister art, but as the common goal of all such yearning toward the other, music stands out clearly, for it is the art in which the material has been overcome to the point of being forgotten.

The element of poetry is something spiritual, it is the floating, infinitely ambiguous words that hang between God and creature. A well-meaning school of poets from a time now half-forgotten caused much rigidity and narrow understanding by too readily comparing poems to engraved stones, busts, jewels, and buildings.

But what I’ve said above explains why poems are like those modest but enchanted cups in which each person sees the riches of their own soul, while impoverished souls see almost nothing at all.

From the Vedas to the Bible, all poetry can be grasped only by the living, and only enjoyed by the living. An engraved stone, a beautiful fabric will always be there, but a poem perhaps only once in a lifetime. A great sophist criticized the poets of his time for knowing too little of the inwardness of words. But what do the people of this time know about the inwardness of life! Those who know neither how to be alone nor how to be together, either how to be proud not how to be humble, neither how to be weaker nor how to be stronger—how should they recognize in poems the signs of solitude, of humanity, of strength?

The more fluently someone speaks, the more powerful their semblance of thought, the farther they are from the beginnings of life’s path. And only by walking the paths of life—through the weariness of its depths and the weariness of its peaks—is the understanding of spiritual art earned. But those paths are long, and their ceaseless experiences wear one another down with such relentless force that the futility of all explanation, of all speech, settles upon the heart like a fatal, yet divine paralysis, and those who truly understand become silent again, like those who truly create.

You summoned me to speak to you about a poet. But I can tell you nothing that his poems cannot tell you, neither about him, nor about other poets, nor about poetry in general. As for what the sea is, the last creatures one should ask are the fish. The only thing one learns from them is that it is not made of wood.







Notes

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First printed in Die Zeit on 16 May 1896.

Though not named, the poets that Hofmannsthal refers to are Johan Peter Eckermann and Stefan George.