The poet and this time
The poet and this time is the title of a lecture that Hugo von Hofmannsthal gave at the end of 1906 in Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt. The first print took place in March 1907 in the Neue Rundschau in Berlin, the first book edition appeared in the same year by S. Fischer Verlag .
The speech marks a turning point in Hofmannsthal's development by containing his first expressly time-critical statement. Some critics saw it as an equivalent to the late literary discourse .
content
Right at the beginning Hofmannsthal refused to adopt a philosophy of art for which he lacked both the means and the intention. He describes ambivalent tendencies and contradictions that show up for him in many areas of his time and that he emphasizes antithetically. The concept of the poet himself, which the listener carries within himself and in which something from the 19th century resonates, does not seem to be clearly delimitable for Hofmannsthal. Works by people who would not be so called sometimes do not lack the poetic, while the works of undoubted poets are often "not free from leaky elements".
Live in a time in which “everything is there and is not there at the same time” and which is full of things “that seem alive and are dead, and full of those that are considered dead and are most alive.” The time is for him "full of unrealized possibilities until illness and at the same time ... staring at things that seem to exist only for the sake of their livelihood and yet which do not contain life." The representative things lack "spirit, the spiritual in relief." . "
Reading as immoderate habit and disease appears as a time phenomenon that insatiable longing expresses poetry to enjoy and be enchanted by it. It is precisely through the feverishly random reading that Hofmannsthal reveals itself to be a remarkable activity in life. Wherever you look you will find it, guided by the poet, who knows the mighty secret of language and rules a world from unseen.
The poet lives in this strange way in the house of time like Saint Alexius of Edessa , with an open soul for the things of the world, even if “under the stairs, where everyone has to pass him ... in the dark, with the dogs; strange and yet at home; as a dead man, as a phantom in everyone's mouth ... as a living person, pushed by the last maid. "
Background and reception
Although Hofmannsthal later refused the speech, it can be regarded as an important poetological reflection, which is also interesting because of its controversial inclusion. Rainer Maria Rilke and Ernst Bertram praised the lecture, while Rudolf Borchardt rejected it. The references to Hofmannsthal's early drama and the Chandos letter, as well as the intellectual relationship between his image of the poet as a seismograph and John Keats ' idea of the poet without identity, are astonishing.
The antithetical structure of his description - for example of things that seem alive and yet dead - is for Hermann Rudolph not just a formal exaggeration, but a means of interpreting the world as wrong . According to this interpretation it is possible for the time-critical individual to postulate a paradoxical situation for the interpretation of reality as legitimate.
literature
Text output
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Collected works in ten individual volumes , Volume 8: Speeches and essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, ISBN 3596221668 .
Secondary literature
- Hermann Rudolph: cultural criticism and conservative revolution . On Hofmannsthal's cultural-political thinking and its problem-historical context, Tübingen 1970
Individual evidence
- ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Poet and This Time , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 56
- ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Poet and This Time , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 57
- ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Poet and This Time , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 63
- ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Poet and This Time , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 66
- ^ Kindler's Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Poet and This Time, Kindler, Munich, 1990, p. 995
- ^ Hermann Rudolph, Cultural Criticism and Conservative Revolution . On Hofmannsthal's cultural-political thinking and its problem-historical context, On the genesis of Hofmannsthal's cultural-political thinking, Tübingen 1970, p. 58