Phantasus

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Title page of an edition from 1898 with Art Nouveau ornamentation

Phantasus is a cycle of poetry by Arno Holz and is considered to be the main work of this poet.

Phantasus appeared for the first time in 1898/99 in two booklets of 50 short poems each. After completing his great drama Ignorabimus (1913), Holz began to revise and greatly expand his volume of poems. The preliminary result of this work process was printed in 1916 (336 pages). Holz continued to write on Phantasus until his death in 1929 . The last version published by himself from 1924/25 is 1345 pages, a 1961/62 estate edition even 1584 pages long.

Holz had already published a large part of the poems of the original Phantasus cycle in various representative magazines and anthologies from the turn of the century.

The title of the work, referring to a romantic tradition, is the name of a figure from ancient mythology . In the case of wood, Phantasus (Greek: Phantasos ), a son of sleep who creates human dreams through his diverse art of transformation, is stylized as an allegory of poetic existence. The theme of phantasus is the phantasy-guided consciousness of the poet, which through a multitude of metamorphoses takes hold of all appearances. Regarding this poetic self-portrayal, Holz explains: "The last 'secret' of the ... Phantasus composition essentially consists in the fact that I am incessantly breaking down into the most heterogeneous things and shapes."

The scientific background of Phantasus is primarily determined by Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic theories ; the lyrical ego wanders through all stages of development of living substance by reproducing it in metamorphoses. In a self-interpretation by Holz it says: “As I went through the entire physical development of my species before my birth, at least in its main stages, so since my birth its psychological development. I was 'everything', and the relics of it are stored up in me as numerous as they are colorful. "

The lyrical style of Phantasus is a counterpart to the technique of the naturalistic “ seconds style ” developed by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf (1862–1941) for drama (cf. The Selicke family ) and prose (cf. Papa Hamlet ) .

Example from Phantasus :

Red roofs!

From the chimneys, here and there, smoke,
upstairs, up, in the sunny air, now and then pigeons.
It's afternoon.
A hen cackles from Mohdricker's gardeners,
the whole town smells of coffee.

I'm a little eight-year-old boy
, lying
flat on
my stomach with my chin in both fists, looking through the hatch in the floor.
Below me, steep, the courtyard,
behind me, thrown away, a book.
Franz Hoffmann. The slave hunters.

How quiet it is!

Only over there in Knorr's gutter are
two sparrows quarreling about a straw,
a man who saws,
and in between, clearly from the church,
in short pauses, regularly, hammering,
the coppersmith Thiel.

If I look down below,
I can see right now on Mother's flower board:
a pot of gold lacquer, two pots of Levkoyen, a geranium
and, in the middle,
neatly in a cigar box, a little Reseda.

How does that smell? Up to me!

And the colors!
Now! How the wind blows over it!
The wonderful, wonderful colors!

I close my eyes. I still see her.

The German Literature Archive Marbach has a collection of manuscripts by Arno Holz, individual pages of Phantasus can be seen in the permanent exhibition in the Literature Museum of Modern Art in Marbach.

expenditure