Rule poetics

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Under control poetry is meant a direction of the sealing art to be strictly applied in accordance with predetermined rules, or a set of rules to carry out this art.

This view was widespread in the Renaissance and Baroque periods . It was based on French absolutism . Versions of German-language rule poetics in the 17th / 18th centuries Century, influenced by the French classical music , there are from Martin Opitz , August Buchner , Sigmund von Birken , Georg Philipp Harsdörffer to Johann Christoph Gottsched . The rule poetics of the Baroque were supposedly based on Greek antiquity (as Goethe claimed, for example ), but this was actually not the case, since the French Classical period took the early Roman Empire as its model and interpreted it in a very idiosyncratic manner. The regulations included, for example, that a playwright should adhere to the “Aristotelian units” of place, time and plot, which was sometimes interpreted very strictly: the place should not change, the time of the plot should not exceed a day and the Plot consist of a single storyline ( rule drama ).

Furthermore, the rule poetics is characterized by discussions about whether artistic models (e.g. the ancient epic ) or a natural event (e.g. historical processes) should be poetically imitated. In his essay Attempt at a Critical Poetry (1730), Gottsched points to the coupling of the principle of reality (history) and the principle of imitation (invented), since, in his opinion, the action must be based on reality.

The baroque rule poetics contributed to the fact that the apparently random dramas by William Shakespeare were underestimated in the 17th and 18th centuries. Initially sensibility and Rococo , then more violent tendencies before the French Revolution such as the Sturm und Drang , and especially the Romanticism turned against the rules of the Ancien Régime . The novel , which with a few exceptions was underestimated, became a field of experimentation for literary emancipation from the rules of the epic. Thus, from around 1750, the aesthetic of genius established itself as a countermovement to rule poetics.

In the 19th century, rule poetics got a boost from the emergence of journalistic art criticism and the political tendencies of the restoration . Caricature of a rule poet is Beckmesser from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) by Richard Wagner .

literature

  • Niels Werber: Literature as a system. On the differentiation of literary communication, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1992. ISBN 978-3-531-12325-7