Poetry and life

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Poetry and Life (from a lecture) is an essay by Hugo von Hofmannsthal that appeared on May 16, 1896 in the Viennese weekly Die Zeit . The work is of particular importance for the poetics of the young poet as well as for his relationship to contemporary art .

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Hofmannsthal is extremely critical of the current state of poetry and writes "that one should hardly talk about the arts at all, almost not be able to talk at all." He complains that "the concept of the whole ... has been lost in art". By combining “nature and replica”, “as in the panoramas and cabinets with wax figures ”, “into an eerie hybrid thing”, the “concept of poetry ... to that of an ornate creed” was reduced.

For Hofmannsthal, the material of poetry is not the experience, “but the word with which one evokes a new existence”. So the lead oneself of-the-soul-writing to formlessness and amateurism , the decomposition of the spiritual in art. Only the word is everything and - in the rhythmic, individual movement of the true artist - calls back the past into a new existence. From the fabric of words, their arrangement, their sound and content, they would evoke a fleeting state of mind, a mood . Every direct reference to life, every imitation is harmful: "There is no direct path from poetry into life, from life no one leads into poetry."

Hofmannsthal underpins the importance of form and rhythm with a direct reference to the influential Stefan George at this time , whose poetry from the year of the soul he presented in his later conversation about poetry : “The value of poetry is not determined by the meaning (otherwise it would be such as wisdom, wisdom), but the form, that is, absolutely nothing external, but that deeply arousing in measure and sound, whereby at all times the origins, the masters have differed from their descendants, the artists of the second order. "

expenditure

literature

  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, ed. by Bernd Schoeller in consultation with Rudolf Hirsch, S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M., 1979, Vol. 8. Speeches and Essays, 1891-1913, pp. 13-19. ISBN 3596221668

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Poesie und Leben, Kindler, Munich, 1990, p. 1008
  2. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Poetry and Life , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 13
  3. ↑ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Poetry and Life , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 15
  4. ↑ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Poetry and Life , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 16
  5. ↑ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Poetry and Life , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays I, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 16