(4 May 2025)

(14 036 words)

(Time to read: 74 minutes)

Gottfried Benn’s “Problems of the Lyrical Poem”, given as a talk at the University of Marburg on 21 August 1951, is together with T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and Paul Valery’s “Poetry and Abstract Thought” (“Poésie et Pensée Abstraite”, 1939) one of the major statements on poetic practice made in the Twentieth Century. Benn’s talk, however, was about much more than poetry: it constituted a shrewd critical analysis of the public culture of the contemporary period and the lack of intellectual values that lay behind it. Benn characterizes the latter as a “Mitte”. The term literally means “middle”, but it soon becomes clear that it possesses a wider and more cutting range of meanings, which include “mediocre”, “average”, “standard”, “conventional”, indeed, what an earlier generation of Avant-Garde artists would have called, “bourgeois”. All of these terms in Benn’s mind describe the standardized and sanitized character of much contemporary culture and, particularly, contemporary verse, which excludes what is provocatively new and original: the creative Other. Precisely because of its polysemic valence, I have left “Mitte” in its original German in my translation.

Benn’s discourse is animated throughout and intellectually informed by a consistent strain of abrasive jocularity, which focuses not only on cultural or poetic matters but on the entire rationalist-utilitarian-scientifically utopian mindset of institutionalized thinking. There is a tongue-in-cheek discussion of Swedish animal eugenicists, who are vying to produce the largest rabbit (page/Seite 38); a matter-of-fact scholarly outline of a mineral scientist amassing data in the field of copper alloys (page/Seite 31) (both are examples of the sterile Gargantuaism that afflicts the contemporary mind, when it takes itself seriously). Gentle sarcasm pervades Benn’s talk, from the “entire row of people sitting around in our fatherland producing poems” (page/Seite 5) to his discussion of those in the “Mitte” who extol the virtues of forest management over poetry (page/Seite 32), and his reductio ad absurdum of the pompous claims of modern medical science, where “the great fear of life can be overcome with Dr. Schieffer’s Elixir of Life. 3.50 Deutsch Marks a bottle” (page/Seite 35). Benn does not shy away from subjecting his own discipline of literature to such deflations, as in his treatment of the latest literary fad, the French movement of “letterisme”, which seeks a progressive liberation of the word through “wheezing, echoes, tongue clicking, burping, coughing and loud laughter” (page/Seite11). At times, his humor is so dry that it may not be humor at all, as when he praises the recent American initiative of getting to the essence of poetry “through questionnaires” (page/Seite 14) (an action that demystifies the poetic act – a course of action that Benn would have supported).

This element of cultural critique begins from the very first lines of Benn’s talk. He starts (pages/Seiten 5-6 of the German original: Limes Verlag. Wiesbaden. 1954) by discussing the hackneyed sentimentality of much of today’s poetic verse and the decorative clichés that it uses, before outlining (pages/Seiten 7–14) the authentic aesthetic of the poetic to be found in modernist poets such as Poe and Mallarmé, both of whom argued for the centrality of language to the poem “in and for itself”. These were the authors of the “modern poem”, the “poem without faith, the poem without hope, the poem directed at no one” (page/Seite 39). Such poetry had no room for jaded conventional themes and devices and Benn (pages/Seiten 15–17) lists four of the latter: the wish (and here he returns to the opening words of his talk) to “poeticise” (“Andichten”) language; the use of the “wie” (“like”, “as”) adverb, instead of simply stating the object rather than comparing it with something else; the seeking of a grandiose effect through colour symbolism; and its employment of the “seraphic” tone, which is meant to uplift and suggest transcendent import (where there is none). Benn then focuses upon the actual material process involved in writing a modern poem (pages/Seiten 18–23), drawing upon his own experience (pages/Seiten 24–27). He quotes at length from one of his earlier essays, “Epilogue and Lyrical Self” (“Epilog und lyrisches Ich”, 1924), where he engaged with the particular sensitivity to language that poet possesses. He follows this (pages/Seiten 29-38) with a consideration of the fractured identity of the modern poetic self, as it attempts to come to terms with an entirely new demotic subject matter vocabulary, in an effort to produce what Benn calls the “absolute” poem (pages/Seiten 39–44). He concludes his talk by addressing, in an autobiographical coda, his public directly (pages/Seiten 44–48).

Benn’s talk is a rhetorically charged linguistic tour de force, into which the audience “sitting on one of the benches in front of me” (page/Seite 17) is frequently interpolated, and where Benn himself, in an act of sympathetic engagement with the latter, often plays down his importance: “I don’t entertain the thought of speaking profoundly” (page/Seite 20). Benn begins in the mode of a dispositio in (quite amusing) sober terms setting the context for what will follow. It is not until midway through his talk that he moves from the historical/literary to the main subject, highlighting his own experience, as he attempts to reconstruct the intensity of poetic writing. Here his own language, and the system of cryptic references that supports it, takes off into a breathless discourse that duplicates on the level of prose the esoteric angularity of his poetic writing. In a text that is challenging and at times mystifying, Benn takes no prisoners. Modern poets, he tells his distinguished (and patient) audience, “are not actually people of the spirit, nor aesthetes, although they certainly make art and that means they require a hard, fully developed brain, a brain with canine teeth, which grinds to pieces all objects of resistance, even its own. They are petit bourgeois, with a born impetus that comes half from a vulcanism and half from apathy. Within the social sphere, they are of little interest – Tasso in Ferrara – then it is gone” [page/Seite 29]. And one can only imagine how the worthy Bürger bzw. Bürgerinnen of Marburg would have reacted to being told that the modern poet “stands closer to journalism than to the Bible” (page/Seite 32) or that “the word is the phallus of the mind” (page/Seite 23).

Benn’s talk includes a complex web of often obscure references to contemporary and Classic culture. I have resisted the temptation to annotate, partially so as not to interrupt the flow of the reading process, and partially because that obscurity is an essential part of the text, mystifying, dislodging, exasperating us, and as such captures some of the incomprehensibility experienced by his initial audience. The reader will have no difficulty with Poe, Rilke and Verlaine, and we need not be told that the author of Werther and Elective Affinities (page/Seite 8) is Goethe. Tracking down other references and allusions, however, requires a greater expenditure of cultural capital. “Nizza and Portofino” (page/Seite 12) are Nice and Portofino, where Nietzsche spent time in the latter years of his life, whilst “Randall Jarell” is Randall Jarrell, the American poet and literay critic (page/Seite 31), and (on the same page) the “Wesendonk-Lied” is the Wesendonck song, composed by Richard Wagner in his early years, named after Mathilde Wesendonck, the poet who wrote the text. Other examples might be found: “Tasso in Ferrara” (same page), the “galli-Maimona diagnose (page/Seite 35), together with “the toad test, a way of establishing the pre-birth gender of a child, “Phanodorm” (page/Seite 36, an anti-depressive that Benn the medicant was familiar with), and the “Migard serpent”, obscure Norse mythology (page/Seite 35). Benn was a lover of books (and of flowers) but not a lover of people (women excluded), and he plunders his bookish knowledge with (and disconcertingly for some) gay abandon.

It would be a self-evident truism to say that in my translation I have tried to be as faithful as I could to Benn’s exorbitant idiom. There is one area, however, where I could not follow him – in his use of punctuation. Benn’s essay began life as a talk and he would have used sparse punctuation in his manuscript (the dash was something that he was particularly drawn to), to signal to himself where one line of thinking ended, and another began (and his audience would have, through the pauses in his deliverance, followed him here). We, however, are readers not listeners, and a written text needs to take that into consideration. Benn’s essay does not. Instead (and perhaps quite laudably) it reproduces the breathless profusion of ideas and labyrinthine energy of the spoken talk. I have tried to retain that energy where I could, but there are passages where such energy has the ultimate effect of obscuring meaning. In those passages, I have often found it necessary to shorten Benn’s sentence structure and to replace subordinating clauses, which are often just connected through a comma or a dash, with full stops. I have also made greater use of paragraphs, where sense demands it. There have also been occasions when I was unsure about the accuracy of my translation. On those occasions, I have put the German in square brackets. The original version can be found at “gottffried benn probleme der lyrik limes verlag wiesbaden”, posted by King’s College London at https: //nms.kcl.ac.uk by andreas recknagel.

“Problems of the Lyrical Poem”

Ladies and Gentlemen,

When you open your newspapers on a Sunday morning (and sometime even during the week), you will often find in the Supplement, normally in the upper right-hand or lower left-hand corner, a text that through its bold type face and particular typography catches the eye. It is a poem. It is normally not a long poem, and for its subject matter usually takes matters relating to the seasons: in Autumn, November mists are woven into the verse; in Spring, crocuses are greeted as the bringers of light; in Summer, the meadows covered in poppies are extolled. In those periods of religious festival, ritual and parable are brought into rhyme. Ultimately, because of the regularity with which all of this happens, year in year out, to be read punctually every week, we must assume that at all times there is an entire row of people sitting around in our fatherland producing poems that they send to the newspapers, and that the newspapers are convinced that the reading public want these poems, otherwise they would use their space for other purposes. The names of these producers of verse are not, on the whole, well known, and they soon disappear from the pages of the feuilletons. It is, as Professor Robert Curtius (with whom I am in a friendly exchange of correspondence) wrote [page/Seite 6], when I recommended one of his students as being quite gifted, “oh, these young people. They are like birds. They sing in the Spring but in summer fall silent again”. We will not concern ourselves here with these poems of occasion and the seasons, although it is quite possible that every now and then a good poem can be found amongst them. But they are my starting point because they provide a collective background [to my topic], and the general public often holds [“lebt”] the opinion that where there is a landscape of a heath or a sunset and standing there are a young man and a young woman, and a melancholy mood prevails, a poem comes into existence. No, it doesn’t: a poem is not brought about in such a fashion. A poem does not “come into existence”: a poem is made. When you take mood out from the rhymed lines, if anything remains after this, then perhaps you have a poem.

I have called my topic “problems of the lyrical poem”, not “problems of poetry or verse”. I have not done this for no reason. Around the concept of the lyric, certain preconceptions have built up over the decades. What sort of preconceptions they are, I will attempt to make clear to you at once through an anecdote. A woman that I am friendly with, a well-known political journalist, wrote to me a while ago saying, “poetry doesn’t mean anything to me, even lyric poetry”. She made a distinction, therefore, between the two types. This woman was, I knew, a great lover of music. She played, above all, classical music. I responded, “I completely understand you. The difference, for example, between Tosca and the Art of Fugue [page/Seite 7] reveals much to me.” What I meant by that was, on the one side stands the emotional, the mood-producing [“Stimmungsgemässige”], the thematic-melodic, and on the other side stands the artistic product. The new form of poem, the lyric, is an artistic product. Bound up with the latter is the concept of self-consciousness [“Bewusstheit”], critical scrutiny and, to use immediately a dangerous phrase, the notion of the artistic. In the production of a poem, one does not observe only the poem but also oneself. Indeed, the very production of a poem is a major issue. It is not the only issue but, in various ways, it is one resounds throughout the poetic.

Quite instructive in this respect are the views of Valery, with whom the simultaneity of the poetic with introspective-critical activity reached limits in which both were merged. He said, “why should we not view the process of the bringing forth of a work of art as in itself a work of art?”. We come across here a defining characteristic of the modern lyrical self, which accords an equal status in its work to poetry and to essay writing: they appear almost to condition one another. Apart from Valery, I could name Eliot, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, also Poe, and then the Surrealists. They were, and are, all interested just as much in the process involved in constructing a poem as in the opus itself. One of them wrote, “I admit that I am much more interested in the forming [‘Gestaltung’] and bringing to completion [‘Verfertigung’} of works than in the works themselves”. This, please note, a modern trait. As far as I know, neither Platen nor Mörike recognized or cultivated this symbiosis [page/Seite 8], nor Storm or Dehmel, and the same goes for Swinburne and Keats. The modern lyricist offers us a virtual philosophy of composition, a systematic of the creative act. And I would like to draw attention to another noteworthy aspect: none of the great novelists of the preceding century also produced great poetry, with the exception, of course, of the author of Werther and Elective Affinities. But neither Tolstoy nor Flaubert, Balzac or Dostoyevsky, Hamsun or Jospeh Conrad wrote a noteworthy poem. Alone amongst the Modernists, James Joyce attempted but, as Thornton Wilder, once wrote, “when you know the incomparable rhythmic depth of his prose, then his verse will alienate you with its excessive musicality and its tone of a quaking ventriloquist. Fundamental typological differences must be at play here, and we would like to identify immediately what they are. When novelists produce poetry, they normally write ballads, action narratives, anecdotes and the like. The novelist also needs for his poem material, themes, the word alone does not satisfy him. He seeks motifs. The word does not engage with, as it does with primary lyricists, the immediate movement of his existence. For the novelist, the word simply describes. We will later see what existential background is present here or is absent.

The new lyric began in France. Until recently, Mallarmé was seen as the centre of this movement but, as I read from recent French publications, [page/Seite 9] Gerard de Nerval (who died in 1855) has since moved into the foreground. In Germany, he is known only as the translator of Goethe, but in France he is recognised today with his Chimeras as the founder of modern poetry. After him came Baudelaire, who died in 1867 – both, therefore, a generation before Mallarmé. It is, however, true that it was Mallarmé who first developed a theory and a definition of poetry and applied it to his own poems, and in doing so initiated the phenomenology of composition of which I speak. Further names will be familiar to you: Verlaine, Rimbaud and then Valery, Apollinaire and the Surrealists, led by Breton and Aragon. This was the centre of the lyrical renaissance, which radiated out to Germany and the Anglo-American world, and to England, particularly to Swinburne (who died in 1909) and William Morris (died in 1896), both therefore contemporaries of the great French writers, but we should really allocate them to the idealist-romantic school. With Eliot, Auden, Henry Miller and Ezra Pound, however, the new style entered the Anglo-American arena fully, and I think that it is possible to say, here and now, that a great lyrical movement is happening there at the moment. I would like to add to this list: O.V. de Milosz, a Lithuanian who died in Paris in 1940, Saint-John Perse, French but who now lives in the USA. From Russia, one should mention Mayakovsky and from Czechoslovakia, Vitezslav Nezval, both before they became Bolshevistic and composed odes to their little father, Stalin. From Germany, the famous names of George, Rilke and Hofmannsthal belong at least partially to this group. Their most beautiful poems are works of pure expression [page/Seite 10], conscious artistic formations within a specified form. Their inner life, admittedly, is subjective and their emotional effects till remain within that noble national and religious sphere of binding ties and projections of totality, which today’s lyric eschews. Then came Heym, Trakl, Werfel – the avant-garde. The beginning of Expressionist poetry in Germany is dated from the appearance in the journal Simplicissimus of the poem “Twilight” by Alfred Lichtenstein in 1911 and the poem “World end” by Jakob von Hoddis, which appeared in the same year.

One of the seminal moments in modern art was the publication of Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto, which appeared on 20. 2. 1909 in Paris in The Figaro. “Nous allons assister à la nuissance du Centaure” – “we will help give birth to the centaur”, he wrote, and a “roaring motor car” is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace. This was the avant-garde; they were also already as individuals the consummate ones [‘die Vollender’]. More recently, one comes across attempts made by publishers and editors to bring a new tone into lyric poetry, a sort of recidivist Dadaism, in which the word “effective” stands sixteen times at the beginning of a new line, after which nothing impressive comes but which is combined with the final sounds of pygmies and Andamanese. This is intended as something global, but for those of us who have been following lyric poetry for forty years, it comes across as a resumption of the method of August Stramm and [page/Seite 11] the “Sturm” circle, or as a repeat of the “Merz” poems of Schwitters (“Anna, you are at the front as you are at the back”). In France, a similar development took place, which was called “Letterism”. Its name was so explicated by its leaders to purge it of any extra poetic values, and the individual letters that had thus been liberated into freedom should form a musical unity that would also be capable of wheezing, echoes, tongue clicking, burping, coughing and loud laughter. What the final result of all of that was, we still don’t know. Some of this, indeed, sounds risible, but it is not completely impossible that out of a transformed feeling for words, extended self-analysis and theories that open up original criticism of language might arise which, when they come into the hands of that one person capable of infusing such theories with all his inward strength might bring forth radiant creations. At the moment, however, one has to say that the lyric in the Western world is held together by the thought of form and the structure of words, not through burping and coughing. Whoever is interested in the experimental but still serious dimension of the modern lyric should consult the journal Das Lot, of which five volumes have appeared so far, as well as the excellent book by Alain Bosquet, Surrealism, which is published by the Karl Henssel Verlag in Berlin.

A while ago, in order to describe the modern poem, I used the term “artistic”, saying that this was a contested concept – indeed, people in Germany [page/Seite 12] don’t like hearing it at all. The average appreciator of the aesthetic associates the term with superficial amusement, the easy muse, also the squandering and failure of any form of transcendence. But in reality, it is a totally serious concept and a central one. “Artistic” is the attempt made by art, within the general decline of content, to make itself the experience of content, and out of this experience to generate a new style. It is an attempt, against the widespread nihilism of values, to lay the grounds for a new transcendence, the transcendence of creative desire. Seen from this perspective, this concept embraces the entire problematic of Expressionism, of abstract art, of the anti-humanist, of aestheticism, of cyclism, of the “hollow man”, in one word, the entire problematic of the world of expression.

This concept has forced its way into our consciousness through Nietzsche, who took it from the French. He said: delicacy in all five artistic senses, the fingers for nuances, psychological morbidity, the gravity of the mise en scene, this Parisian seriousness par excellence – and art as the real task of life, art as its metaphysical activity. All of that he names “artistic” – brightness, energy [‘Wurf;], Gaya – these his Ligurian concepts around wave and play, and as a conclusion: you ought to have sung, oh my soul – all of these his exclamations from Nizza and Portofino – and above them all he allowed his three mysterious words to hover: “Olympia of Semblance” [“Scheins”]. Olympia, where the great gods had dwelt, where Zeus for two thousand years had ruled, where [page/Seite 13] Moira had directed fate. And now – pure semblance! That was a turning point! This was not the aestheticism that had surged through Pater and Ruskin and, in a more inspired way, through Wilde. This was something quite different, and to describe it there existed one word that has an antique resonance: fate [“Verhängnis”]. Its inner being was to tear apart through words, with the propulsion to express itself, to formulate, to dazzle, to sparkle, at the risk of any danger: that was a new form of existence. Its source was in Flaubert, who gave a premonitory glimpse of the columns of the Acropolis and what might be achieved in immortal beauty through sentences, words, the vocal. Another source was Novalis, who spoke of art as a progressive anthropology, and even Schiller was a source, in whom there is the strange emphasis upon an aesthetic semblance that not only but also wants to be. Those who might doubt that this was the culmination of a distinct development might consider the words from Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: ” even on its most lofty peak, poetry looks quite superficial. The further it retreats into an inner world, the further is it on the way to going under”. More was to come, but the compulsion to integration took place here.

It is a long story, and I have tried often in my books to explain it. Today, I will restrict myself to poetry, and this is possible because all of these battles for Being [‘Sein’] play themselves out in the poem, as if on a stage. For behind the modern poem exist the problems of our age, of art, of the inner foundations of our existence, and in a much more pressing and radical way {page/Seite 14] than in a novel or even in a play. A poem is always a questioning of the self, and all the sphinxes and paintings from Sais become a part of the answer. But I want to avoid anything too profound and remain empirical. Therefore, I raise the question: what are the particular themes of the lyrical poem today? And, please note, this is about words, form, rhyme, long or short poems, and about to whom the poem is directed, about levels of meaning, choice of theme, metaphors. Do you know from where I have taken these concepts? They are all from a questionnaire sent to practicing poets in America. In the USA, people attempt to promote lyrical poetry through questionnaires. I find that interesting because it means that with lyric poets over there, the same considerations are in play as here. For example, the question of whether it should be a long or a short poem had already been raised by Poe, and Eliot took up the same question. It is an extremely personal choice. Above all, I found the particular question about to whom a poem is directed highly relevant. It is indeed a critical point, and a certain Richard Wilbur[ns] gave a remarkable answer to it. A poem, he said, is directed to the Muse, and he writes this in order, amongst other things, to hide the fact that poems are directed to nobody. One sees from this that over there the monological character of the lyric is fully recognized, the latter being indeed an anachronistic art form.

But I don’t want to lecture you on something that you can easily find in books. Instead, I would like to offer you something tangible, even if I run the risk of touching upon the banal instead of explicating the fundamental, For as you know, he who attempts to reach the fundamental ends up at the bottom [“der geht zu Grunde, der [page/Seite 15] immer zu Gründen geht”], and you learnt from Flaubert that there is nothing in art that is simply external. I imagine that you will ask me the question about what a modern poem actually is, what it looks like. I would like to begin to answer that question with negative pronouncements, namely: what does a modern poem not look like? I will give you four diagnostic examples [“Symptome”], with whose help you yourselves in the future can tell whether a poem from 1950 is identical with its time or is not. I am taking these examples from well-known anthologies. The four examples are, firstly, the composition with the title “The Field of Stubbles” (“Das Stoppelfeld”)

A barren field lies before my window.

Once heavy ears of wheat rocked

to and fro on the summer wind.

From their dropping, the sparrows feed themselves today.

[Ein kahles Feld vor meinem Fenster liegt

jüngst haben sich dort schwere Weizennähren

im Sommerwind hin- und hergewiegt

vom Ausfall heute sich die Spätzen nähren].

It continues in this way for three stanzas, then in the fourth and final one comes the turning to the “I”. It begins, “does not my entire life hover before me here?” [“Schwebt mir nicht hier mein eignes Leben vor?”].

We have, therefore, two objects. Firstly, the inanimate nature that is put into verse, and in the conclusion, the author, who now turns towards his inner self or believes that he turns towards it. A poem, therefore, has a split and an opposition between the versified object and the poetic self, of external staffage and inner connection. That, I would say, is for today a primitive way of documenting lyrical substance. Even if the author [page/Seite 16] does not want to adopt the phrase coined by Marinetti, “detruire le Je dans la litterature” (“destroy the I in literature”), the effect he achieves with his method is superannuated. Admittedly, I will quickly add that there are wonderful poems in German that are composed within this model, such as Eichendorff’s “Moon at Night” (“Mondnacht”), but that was over a hundred years ago.

The second symptom is the use of “wie” [“like”, “as”]. You should consider how often in a poem a “like” appears or an “as when” or “it is as if”. These are facilitating constructions, where the text is normally just idling. “My song rolls on like gold from the sun – the sun lies on the copper roof like a bronze jewel – my song shakes like a channeled flood – like a flower in a silent night – pale as silk-love blooms like a lily -“. The “like” is always a breech in vision, it draws things to it, it compares, it is not a primary placing [“Setzung”]. But here too I must add that there are great poems that contain a “wie”. Rilke was a major poet. In one of his most beautiful poems, the “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, “wie” appears in three of the four stanzas, and indeed rather banal uses of “wie”, such as “like a candelabra”, “like the skin of a predatory animal”, “like a star”. And in his poem “Blue Hydrangeas”, “wie” is used four times in four stanzas: “as in a children’s apron”, “as in old blue writing paper”. Well, alright, Rilke could get away with that, but as a basic principle you can be assured that “wie” always brings about a break in the storytelling, an intrusion of the feuillitonistic into the lyrical poem, a slackening of linguistic tension, a weakening of creative transformation.

The third symptom is more harmless. Note how often [page/Seite 17] colors appear in these verses: red, purple, opaline, silver (with its derivative silvery), brown, green, orange, gray, golden. By using these, the author presumably believes that he is making a luxuriant and fantasy-rich effect, but does not seem to see that these colors are simply verbal clichés, which are more appropriately used by opticians and eye doctors. In this regard, however, I must confess to the use of a certain colour: “blue”. I’ll come back to this.

The fourth symptom is the cultivation of a seraphic tone, when everything happens at once or quickly arrives with the murmuring of fountains and harps, and beautiful nights with stillness, and chains that have no beginning, the completion of circles bringing things to perfection, the victors are the stars, the founding of new gods, and similar and expansive feelings. This is all normally a cheap speculation on the sentimentality and soft feelings [“Weichlichkeit”] of the reader. This seraphic tone does not represent an overcoming of the earthly but a flight from the same. The great poet, however, is also a great realist, and is close to all realities – he burdens himself with all realities – he is supremely earthly, a cicada, according to legend, born from the soil, the Athenic insect. He will distribute the esoteric and the seraphic only with great caution and only on a hard, realistic basis. And please scrutinize the word “steep”. One wants to reach heights but fails to do so. When, therefore, you come across a poem, pick up a pencil as you would for a crossword puzzle and pay attention to its composition, to the use of “wie”, its color scale, seraphic tone, and you will quickly come to your own assessment of it [page/Seite 18].

May I at this point make the statement that in lyrical poetry the second rate is impermissible, intolerable. The scope of the lyrical poem is narrow, its means very subtle, its content the ens realisimus of substances. So, for that reason our criteria must also be extreme. Second-rate novels are not so intolerable. They can entertain, instruct, be gripping, but the lyrical poem must either be exorbitant or nothing at all. That belongs to its essence. And to its essence also belongs something else: the tragic experience of the poet in himself [“an sich selbst”]. None of the great lyricists have left behind more than six to eight perfect poems. The remaining ones may be interesting seen from the point of view of the biographical development of the author, but sufficient unto themselves [“in sich ruhend”], shining forth within themselves, full of extended fascination, are only a few – around these six poems lie thirty to fifty years of asceticism, suffering and struggle. The I want to describe now one process more directly than is usually the case: it is the process of the composition of a poem. What does the author intend? What is the situation at hand? The situation is the following. The author possesses:

Firstly, a mute [“dumpf”] creative kernel of psychic material.

Secondly, he has words, which lie at hand, stand at his disposal, with which he can do business, which he can move. He knows, so to speak, his words. There is, in fact, something that one can call an allocation of words to the author. Perhaps on certain days [page/Seite 19] he comes across specific words that preoccupy him, which excite him, which he believes that he can use as leitmotifs.

Thirdly, he possesses the thread of Ariadne, which leads him out of his bipolar tension, with absolute certainty leads him out – and now comes something mysterious: the poem is already finished before it has begun, even though he doesn’t as yet know what that text will be. The poem cannot say anything different as it says when it is finished. [“das Gedicht kann gar nicht lauten, als es eben lautet wenn es fertig ist”]. That, of course. might take a very long time, weeks, years, but until it is ready you shouldn’t make it public. You will continue to feel around it, around single words, around lines. You isolate the second stanza, look at it, with the third stanza, you ask yourself whether it is the missing link between the second and the fourth stanza, and so will you be inwardly led, reviewing everything in this way, self-scrutinizing and remaining fully critical of all the stanzas. This is a classic example of that freedom that lies in the tow of necessity, of which Schiller speaks. You could also say that a poem is like one of those ships of the Phaeacians, of which Homer wrote that without a helmsman they could still sail straight right out of the harbor. A young writer with whom I am not acquainted, and whom I don’t know whether he writes lyrical poetry, made the observation in the journal Lot that exactly captures this state of affairs. He wrote, “the question of whom a poem is from is in all cases an idle one. An X factor, which can never be nullified [“reduziert”], has contributed to the authorship of the poem. In other words, all poems [page/Seite 20] have a Homeric dimension; every poem has many authors, that means unknown authors”.

This state of affairs is so strange that I would express it rather differently. Somethingorother within one flings out a few lines, fumbles around a few lines. Something else in you takes up these lines in its hand, places them in a kind of observation apparatus, a microscope, tests them, colors them and looks for pathological sections. If the first account is rather naive, the second is quite different: rather roué [“raffiniert”] and skeptical. If the first is perhaps subjective, the second brings into play an objective world. It is the formal, the intellectual [“geistig”] principle.

I don’t entertain the thought of speaking profoundly or in detail about poetic form. Form, in isolation, is a difficult concept. But form is, most definitely, the poem. The content of a poem, let’s say sorrow, feelings of panic, the final flux – everyone has those, and these make up the human condition, their possession is more or less of a manifold and sublime extent. But the lyrical poem becomes what it is only when it reaches a form that makes this content autochthonic, bears it along, makes out of its words pure magic [“Faszination”]. Form in isolation, pure form in itself, does not exist. Form is Being, the existential commission of the artist, his ultimate goal. In this sense, we must understand the statement made by Staiger: form is the highest content.

Let us look at an example. Surely everyone has walked through a park. It is Autumn, blue skies, white clouds, something sombre over the grassy tracks [page/Seite 21]: a day of departure. All of this makes you melancholy, thoughtful, you start to reflect. That is lovely, that is good, but it is not a poem. Now comes Stefan George and sees all of this exactly as you do, but he is fully aware of his feelings, observes them and starts to write:

Come into the park they say is dead and look:

the shimmer of the distant smiling shores

the stainless clouds of unhoped-for blue

bring to light the pond and motely paths.

[komm in den totgesagten park und schau:

Der Schimmer ferner lächelnder gestade

Der reinen wolken unverhoffter blau

Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.]

George knows his words and what to do with them. He knows the appropriate ordering of these words, creates form with them, seeks rhymes, peaceful, quiet stanzas and stanzas with expression, and now comes into being one of the most beautiful autumnal garden poems of our age, three stanzas in four lines, which held the entire century in awe just on account of their form.

Perhaps some of you might think that I am using the word “fascination” too literally. I have to say that I find concepts like “Faszination” extremely interesting, exciting even, but which are given far too little attention in German aesthetics and literary criticism. With us Germans, everything should be deep and meaningful, dark and encompassing everything – in touch with the maternal, that favorite destination of the Germans. Contrary to that, I believe that the inner transformations that art that is capable of bringing forth in a poem are genuine changes and transformations, and their effect will be carried on to future generations, and will emerge with greater success out of that which is arousing [“Erregenden”] and “faszinierend” than out of that which is composed and placid [“aus dem Gefassten und Gestillten”] page/Seite 22].

Just a further observation regarding the last point. I said above that the author possesses a dumb creative kernel, psychic material, which would be, in other words, the object that should form the basis of a poem. Also here, some have made interesting observations, notably from the French school but also from Poe, whom Eliot in a recent essay took up once again. Poe said, the object is only the means to an end; the end is the poem. Someone else said: a poem should not have anything in its sights other than itself. A third person has argued that a poem does not express anything; a poem simply is. In Hofmannsthal who, at least in his final period consciously made contact with the cultic, with self-formation [“Bildung”] and nation, I found a very radical observation: “there is no direct path that leads from poetry into life; and from life, no path into poetry”. That can’t mean anything other than poetry, as the poem, is autonomous; it is a life for itself, and that fact is confirmed by his next statement: “words are everything”. Most famous of all is the maxim by Mallarmé: “a poem does not consist of feelings but words”. Eliot adopts the curious point of view that a certain amount of impurity must be retained even in the pure poem. The object must in a certain sense be valued for its own sake if the lyric as poetry is to be experienced. I would say that behind every poem continues to exist imperceptibly the author, his Being, his existence, his inner state. Even objects appear in the poem only because they were already his objects. He remains, therefore, in all instances [page/Seite 23] that impurity in Eliot’s sense of the word. I mean that basically there is no other object for the lyrical poem beyond the lyricist himself.

I now turn to a third special topic and in doing so, I am probably taking a question out of your mouths, and that is namely: “what is so important with this preoccupation with the word? The theoreticians of the lyric and the lyricists themselves keep talking about the word, but we also have words. Do they then have special words? What is going on with this word?”. This is a very difficult question, but I will try and answer you, although in doing so I will have to go back to personal experience, to experience of a particular type.

There are colors and sounds in nature, but there are no words. Although we read in Goethe, “from the brushes of colors have emerged many distinguished artists”, we must quickly add that the relationship to the word is primary [for the poetic artist], and this contact cannot be learnt. You can learn how to paint watercolors, learn tightrope walking, balancing acts, walking on nails, but arranging stimulating words, that you can either do or not do. The word is the phallus of the mind [“Geist”], rooted in our center. And with that, rooted in the language of our nation. Paintings, statues, sonatas, symphonies are international – poems never. One can indeed define the poem as the untranslatable. Consciousness grows into and within words, consciousness attains a transcendent peak in words. “To forget” – what do these letters add up to? Nothing, to understand nothing. But with them, consciousness is, in a certain way, connected. It fastens itself to these letters, and these letters, and these letters ordered one after another, fasten themselves [page/Seite 24] acoustically and emotionally to our consciousness. For that reason, “oublier” is never “vergessen”. Or “nevermore”, with its two short, closed initial syllables “never” and the dark screaming “more”, in which for us the “moor” and “la mort” resound, is not “nimmermehr” – “nevermore” is more beautiful. Words have an effect beyond their information and content; they are, on the one hand, intellect {“Geist”] but, on the other hand, they have the essence and ambiguity of things of nature.

I must now transport myself back to another period of my productive life in order to clarify what I mean. If you will permit me, I will present you with what I wrote regarding the connection between the lyrical self and the word back in 1923. I wrote then, “there live in the sea organisms that possess a lower zoological constitution, and are covered with cilium [“Flimmerhaar”, literally “glimmering hair”]. Cilium is that primitive sensory organ that existed before a differentiation took place between the energies of the senses. It is a general tactile organ, the primary medium of contact with the environment of the sea. Try to imagine a human body covered with such cilium, not only in the brain but over its total organism. It has a specific function to perform: to sharply isolate the observation of stimuli. Such a function can be applied to the word and, in particular, to substantives (it is less relevant to adjectives and hardly at all to verbal configurations). Its real value lies with the chiffre, the manifest image, the black letter: it alone”.

I interrupt just for a moment these earlier pronouncements of mine to emphasize the fact that the cilium is always groping towards something, namely words, and these words that have been thus attained flow immediately together to form a chiffre, a stylistic figure. Here the moon no longer fills bush and valley as it did two hundred years ago. Rather, and please note, this black [page/Seite 25] letter is already an artwork. We are looking, therefore, at an intermediate layer between nature and the mind. We are looking at something that has been formed by the mind, where there is at play something that is technically offered to us.

The cilium is not always active. It has its moments. The lyrical self is a fractured [“durchbrochenes”] self, the self in a cage [‘Gitter-Ich’], experienced with flight, baptised with sorrow. It is forever waiting for its hour, where it can momentarily warm itself whilst waiting for its Southern Complex with its surgent nature, namely the moment of intoxication, in which all connections can be penetrated, i.e. the moment in which reality is broken up, can be achieved and freedom created for the poem – through words. Now in an hour such as this. Let us listen further [to these earlier pronouncements]:

“Now in an hour such as this it is often not far off. While reading a book, no, while reading numerous books at random, there is a confusion of eras, a mixture of material and aspects, the opening up of further typological layers: rapt in a flowing beginning. Now comes fatigue born from difficult nights, pliability of structure often of value, absolutely necessary for the great hour. Now perhaps words will draw near, words in profusion and confusion, their clarity not as yet discernible, but the cilium picks up on them. There might arise a blue familiarity. What joy! What pure experience! One thinks back to all the empty, lifeless compositions, the preambles without any suggestivity for the single colour. But now one can conjure up in one’s heart the skies above Sansibar, the skies over the petals of the bougainvillea, and the sea of Syrten. One thinks of the eternal [page/Seite 26] and beautiful word! Not for nothing do I say the word “blue”. It is an absolute word, the purveyor of the Ligurian complex, with an enormous power to transport. It is the principal means to penetrate all connections, after which the igniting of the self begins, the “deathly finale”, towards which they stream, those distant realms, in order to merge themselves into the order of that pale Hyperemia, Phoenicians, megaliths, lernaean fields. These are names partially formed by me, but when they come close, they become greater than they are. Astarte, Geta, Heracles, are certainly notes from my books, but when their hour approaches that is the hour of Pan’s flutes, sounding through the forest. Their wings, their boats, the crowns that they wear are laid to one side as anathema but are elements of the poem.

Words, words – substantives! They have only to spread their wings and centuries fall beneath their flight. Take, for example, a forest of anemone, a fine, small plant growing between tree trunks, and then, over and beyond them, meadows of narcissus, in all their throats smoke and haze, in the olive trees the wind blooms and rises over marble steps, buried in the breath of fulfilment. Or just consider olives and the theogonies – centuries fall to their flight. The botanical and the geographical, peoples and countries, all of the historical and systematic worlds that have been lost find here their fruition and their dream – all recklessness, all melancholy, all the hopelessness of the spirit become tangible out of the layers of a cross-section of a concept”. And then I closed these words from 1923 with the following sentences [page/Seite 27]:

“The power of the word that can hardly be explained, which loosens and orders. Strange power of the hour, out of forms it pushes under the form-demanding power of nothingness. Transcendent reality of the stanza full of decline and full of eternal return, the vulnerability of the individual and the Being of the cosmos, which in its antithesis transfigures itself. It bears the seas and the heights of the night and turns Creation into a stygian dream: ‘Never and always’ “. More about the word, I do not want to say. I don’t know whether I have been successful in bringing home to you that we are dealing with something special here. We have come accept that words have a latent existence and possess a magical effect on those who are suitably attuned to them, and which empowers them to pass on that magic to others. This seems to me to be the final mystery in which, before which, our forever careful, thoroughly analytical consciousness, that is only occasionally broken by a trance, becomes aware of its limits.

Let us take stock of where we have reached. In what has gone before, I have introduced you to three specific themes in lyrical poetry. Namely, and firstly, what a modern poem does not look like; secondly, the process through which a poem is produced; and thirdly, I tried to say something about the word. There are still many special topics in our area that could be discussed – too many.

An important one would be rhyme. Homer, Vergil, Sapho, Horace did not know of it. It first appears with Walther von der Vogelweide and the Troubadours. Whoever is interested in the history of rhyme will find a stimulating account [page/Seite 28] in Curtius, in his work, European Literature and the Middle Ages. In Goethe, I came across this surprising observation: “since Klopstock freed us from the rhyme”. Today, we would say that the free rhymes that Klopstock and Hölderlin won us over to are, in the hands of mediocrities, a good deal worse than rhyme. The rhyme is, in general terms, a principal of order and control in a poem. That Verlaine and Rilke, both of whom essentially made use of rhyme, were the last ones to bring to expression the full charm of the rhyme is self-evident. In them, the refined and sacred components of the rhyme achieved their full effect. Since then, there is evidence perhaps of a certain exhaustion of rhyme; we are over familiar with it from all the thousands of poems that have used rhyme, and the answer of the following rhyme, in the text. Some authors attempt to put life back into it by incorporating proper names and foreign words, but that changes little. I see from reading Curtius that this is not the first time that this has happened in literature. He says, for example, that “writers in Provence overtaxed rhyming. In their virtuosic display of unusual rhymes, both the music of the word and its sense disappeared”. The lyrical author himself will certainly always experience rhyme as a principle that does not purely emanate from himself but comes to him out of language, and for that reason he will always analyze it carefully and often stand before it with great caution. In the American questionnaire about the lyrical poem referred to above, one of the questions centered on the use of rhyme, and I would like to pass on to you one of the answers [page/Seite 29]. A certain Randall Jarell said, “rhyming as an automatic structural prop has a certain attraction for me, when it is treated in an automatic way, but it is dearest to me when it is irregular, living and indiscernible”.

These were some special topics in the field of the lyrical poem. Now we have to look the producers of such entities directly in the eye, the lyrical self itself, face to face with a sharper focus. What type of people are these lyricists, psychologically, sociologically, as a phenomenon? First of all, we must counter the supposition that they are mere day dreamers. Others may dream but they are the assessors of dreams and furthermore out of dreams they must allow words to come to them. Lyricists, in fact, are not people of the spirit [“keine geistigen Menschen”], nor aesthetes. They certainly make art; that means they require a hard, fully developed brain, a brain with canine teeth, which grinds to pieces all objects of resistance, even its own. They are petit bourgeois, with a born impetus that comes half from vulcanism and half from apathy. Within the social sphere, they are of little interest – Tasso in Ferrara – then it’s gone, no more Leonaras, no victory wreaths that change from brow to brow. But neither are they pie in the sky idealists [“Himmelstürmer”], nor Titans. They are on the whole quiet people, inwardly quiet. They don’t feel that they have to get things right all at once. Furthermore, they have to contain themes within themselves, year in year out. They must be able to remain silent. Valery remained silent for twenty years, Rilke went for fourteen years without a poem then came the Duino Elegies. Consider a parallel with the realm of music: at first, it was the Wesendonk-Lied, “Dreams”, then after years [page/Seite 30], it was the second act of Tristan. And now an example closer to home (since I am standing right before you and talking to you), I will add a personal memory, just to draw you attention to the slow process of [poetic] production. In my volume of poetry, Static Poems, there is a poem consisting of only two stanzas, but there is a gap of twenty years between these stanzas. I had written the first stanza, which I liked, but I couldn’t find a second one. Then after twenty years of seeking, of practice, of testing and discarding, I succeeded in finding the second stanza. The poem is called “Wave of the Night” [“Welle der Nacht”]. One has to bear something inside for such a time. Such a long period sometimes spans the writing of even a small poem. So, who are these poets? Eccentrics, bedsit dwellers, who have given up life in order to exist [“sie geben die Existenz auf, um zu exististieren”], not caring whether others see the poem as the history of a non-event [‘Nichtgeschehenem’] and define mastery as egotism. Really, they are only phenomena. And if these phenomena then die, and we take them down from the cross, we have to be honest and admit that it was they who nailed themselves to the cross in the first place. What made them do it? Something must have made them do it.

To bring this type a little closer to you from a different perspective, I would like to draw attention to the following. Try to bring to mind the fundamental difference between a thinker and a poet, the scholar and the artist. The two are often mentioned together, thrown into a pot as if there coexisted here a noteworthy identity. Far from it! Fully wrapped in himself [page/Seiet 31] is the artist. A scholar might be working in the field of copper alloys, first used in Europe over 2000 years ago. He has at his disposal scientific analyses stretching from the year 1860 to 1948, 4729 in total. At his disposal is a body of scholarship on which he can rely written by a body of recognised professors; all in all producing works that amount to 3000 pages. He inquires through the international inter-library loan service what one is thinking in Cambridge about Fahlore. Through the quarterly circulars published by university departments, he is informed where and who in other countries is working on the same topic. Through the exchange of opinions and correspondence, he makes sure of the facts, and he proceeds half a step further, substantiates this half step with learned papers. He is never a solitary figure on his own. The artist has none of this. He stands alone, by himself, exposed to accusations of willful stubbornness and foolishness. He answers, however, only to himself. He sets things in motion and brings them to fruition. he follows an inner voice that no one hears. He doesn’t know where this voice comes from, nor know what it finally wants to say. The artist works alone. The lyrical poet, in particular, works alone. In every decade, there live but a few great lyricists, dispersed across the nations, composing in various language, largely unknown to one another – these “Pharoah lighthouses”, as the French call them; these figures who forever light up the great creative sea, while they remain themselves in the dark.

Then a particular “I” stands up and says to itself. That is the way I am today. This disposition also lies in me. Let’s say that this language, my German language, stands [page/Seite 32] at my disposal. This language with its centuries’ long traditions, with its unique words that have been infused with sense and mood by its lyrical practitioners. But also slang expressions, argot, the colloquial [“Rotwelsch”], hammered into it by two world wars, supplemented by foreign words, quotations, sport’s jargon, reminiscences of antiquity, are in my possession. The “I” of today, which learns more from newspapers than from philosophy, who stands closer to journalism than to the Bible, to whom a first-rate hit song contains more centuries than a motet, who believes more in the fleeting nature of things than in Nain or the Lourdes, who has discovered that when you make your bed you have to lie in it ,and there is no one there to tuck you in. This “I” works within a form of wonder, on a little stanza that embraces two poles: the “Ich” and its source in language. It works around an ellipsis, the curves of which initially fall away and then, in total tranquility, sink into themselves.

But all of this just touches the surface. We have yet more questions to ask. What lies behind all of this? What realities and super-realities lie hidden in this lyrical self? And now we come across problems. This lyrical self stands with its back against the wall, [adopts postures of] defence and aggression. It defends itself against the impending “Mitte”. You are sick, says the “Mitte”, you have no healthy inner life. You are a degenerate – where do you in fact come from?

The great poets of the last century came from the bourgeois class, the lyrical self replies. No one ws avaricious, criminal or ended [page/Seite 33] in suicide (I exclude the “poetes maudits” from this account). But your “healthy” and “sick” seem to me like concepts from zoology, conined by vetinarians. Notions of consciousness don’t appear in their vocabulary. The various forms of exhaustion, the unmotivated changes of mood, the daily fluctuations, the optical seeking of green, suddenly, reaching a high through melodies, not being able to sleep, [finding things] repellent and disgusting, and experiencing elevated feelings as a devastation. All of these crises of consciousness, the stigmata of the last quarter, this completely painful interiority can barely be grasped. Good, the “Mitte” say. But what your clique peddles, that is a sterile cerebralism and empty formalism. This is dehumanisation. This is not the eternal in mankind. These are interferences in his vital organs. Let’s get back to the forestry management, the culture of the earth! Pay attention to ground water. Regulate trout farms. What did Ruskin say? “All art forms are based on the manual cultivation of the land”.

For my part, says the lyrical self, I will at most reach seventy. I am solely dependent on myself; I don’t relate in any way to the “Mitte”. Neither do I know how to sow. I live in the city; the neon light energizes me. I am tied to myself, tied therefore to a person; I am tied to the here and now. What, cries the “Mitte”: “do you not want to be greater than you are? This is the transcendence of the lower man. You are mocking the greater totality of the human. What is all this chit-chat about words? That is the primate of material [page/Seite 34], degeneration of the spirit into the inorganic, that is the fourth age, the suicidal age. What matters is the survival of the higher principle”.

Leave the higher principle to one side, replies the lyrical self. Let us remain empirical. You must have come across the word Moira. This is the past that has been allocated to me, that is the Parca, and it says: this is your hour, demarcate your limits, check your reserves, don’t dilly-dally about “the general”, don’t indulge in any fire magic with the “continuity of the higher principle”. You have reached your heights, that is why I am talking with you. Naturally, you are not entitled to penetrate into other realms. There are many Moira; I speak also with others, look at each as they interpret my words. But this is the circle that has been allocated to you: seek out your words, sketch out your morphology, express yourself. Just quietly take up the task of a partial function [“Teilfunktion”] but deal with it earnestly. I will whisper in your ear: voluminous universality is an archaic dream and not a part of the moment of today.

Your Moira! A figure from the ethical decision-making of the Western world, says the “Mitte”. “The Parcae are everywhere – how convenient! You [the lyrical self] drag all of this out because you are incapable: you are completely unable to give a deep and true picture of mankind, you with your isolated art, the producer of distorted images and devastations of the spirt – you should purvey clear, universal [“ganzweltliche”] physiognomic and symbolic knowledge”. Wonderful, says the lyrical self. I am familiar with your evening readings – everything abstract is inhuman – you have enriched me; you have taught me to see clearly. Not [page/Seite 35] that we would want to destroy or even endanger this “Mitte”. On the contrary, this “Mitte” endangers us and with it something that they may wish to retain.: us, the final remains of a mankind that still believes in the Absolute and lives through it. These “Mitte” analysts want to take this from us. In their eyes, we are only a sickness and clinical images of melancholy and schizophrenia are summoned up to conjure us away, because we stand beyond the cult of the earth and the cult of the dead. We are like women without their lower regions visible at an Oktoberfest; we are mere grimaces, bankrupt incomplete existences. Any miscredit that the “Mitte” might lie at our door, they are entitled to.

For that reason, we must look again at this “Mitte”. We have to look this “Mitte” in the eye, this “Mitte” that knows everything better than us, everything from the past and from the future, this supposedly organic, natural, earthbound “Mitte”, God’s beautiful “Mitte”. Let’s focus once again on this “Mitte”. This “Mitte” is the Western world, which no longer wants to defend itself but wants to experience fear, and to be brought down. For breakfast, a little Midgard serpent, and in the evening a slice of Oceanus, the unbounded. Do not be afraid: that is already to be unreligious and anti-humanitarian. But in this fear, they hunt through the ages, tear us all along with them, such is their hurry. It begins with the toad test. After eight days, they want to know whether she is pregnant, and in the second month apply the Galli -Maimona diagnose, to see if it is a boy or a girl. In the theatre, they want to view their mindless plays, where in the first scene a guest arrives and on spotting a young woman stops short; [page/Seite 36] in the second scene, a dinner quest drops the fried potatoes on their upside, because the server had tripped – that is the redeeming humour, bound to the earthy. Once back home, they suddenly recall their existential isolation [“Geworfenheit”] and take some phanodorm to calm themselves. This “Mitte” wants to dictate to you what you should write and think, from what point of view you should write and think, and they will even help you in doing this by providing you with psychotherapy, with psychosomatic help, which should make you a useful person, rehabilitate you, harmonise you with your environment, with the world above and the world below. They show up with association practices, fractionated active practices, meditation courses, service to the community, self-help for the individual, removal of complexes, and through this they help provide the renovation of your neurotic personality according to your constitution. If you can afford all of this through your health insurance, you will be a functioning person yet again, suitable for, shall we say, forty days’ work in the textile industry. This, therefore, is the “Mitte” seen causal-analytically or final-synthetically.

No, from this “Mitte” I accept no instruction. My middle [“Mitte”] is intact. The man of today either has a middle like he never had in the past or he has not; the man of today also is as deep as he ever was or he is not; either he has the capacity for transformation, and occasionally an inner law, or he never had such a law; something is either inflicted on him that he must on all occasions and in all moments of danger bring to expression, or nothing has been inflicted on him. But these criteria of the contemporary cultural cycle, which have lasted for a thousand years, do not represent the maxims of the anthropological law in its entirety {Page/Seite 37}. That law is further than this, more than this, and adheres to other cultural cycles, the anti-humanitarian, the pre-monotheistic, the Egyptian, the Minoan, that of the Chimu. In this law new criteria are present and come into existence: the technical, robot cultures, radar cultures. Moreover, the fear experience by the “Mitte” is a quite particular fear. I saw recently in a much-read daily newspaper an advertisement framed by deep borders: “the great fear of life can be overcome with Dr. Schieffer’s Elixir of Life, D.M. 3.50 a bottle”.

The lyrical self continues to exist, which seems to me to be a paradoxical situation. The “Mitte” tolerates anything that is scientific, nothing that is artistic. It tolerates cybernetics, that new science of creation that produces robots. Have you for one moment ever considered the fact that what today mankind still thinks, still calls thinking, has already been thought by machines, and these machines even out do humans. Their ventils are more precise, their safety catches more stable than they are in our broken-down wrecks. They transform letters into tones and deliver eight hours of memory. Sick pieces are excised and replaced with fresh ones = thinking therefore goes into the robotic – and what is left over, where does that go? One could even say that what was called thinking in the past was not thinking at all but something quite different. At any rate, now it has been overtaken by cybernetics, which holds in store for man, through montage and machinery, the animism that he has lost, the magical [page/Seite 38] capacity to look into the heart of nature, returning to him his lost senses. And around the robots, the triploid rabbits jump, sixty-six chromosomes on a personal level, still unfertile but with eighty-eight chromosomes things start to move upwards. Goesta Haegquist and Dr. A. Bane are opening the new season: gigantism, limbs of monstrous size, titanic genitals – a new animal world is in the making. And now should the painters with the sacred gold of the Madonna icons, and the poets with the Easter Passion of Paul Gerhardt continue their work? That seems to me absurd.

“But what does all of this have to do with lyrical poetry?” you will say. It has a lot to do with lyrical poetry; it has everything to do with it. The lyric poet cannot have too much knowledge; he cannot work hard enough; he must be fully apprised of everything; he must take his bearings and know where the world is at the moment, what hour stands over the earth this afternoon. One has to fight at close range to the bull, say the great matadors, then perhaps victory will be ours. There must be nothing accidental in a poem. What Valery wrote about Moltke, “for this unflappable hero, the real enemy was chance”, applies also to the lyrical poet. He must seal up his poem against intrusions, possibilities of disturbance seal things up through his language; he must himself clear his fronts. He must have a sharp sense of smell [“Nüstern”], “this is where my genius lies”, said Nietzsche. A sense that can detect all starting and finishing posts [“Nüstern auf allen Start- und Sattelplatzen”], there where the material and ideal points of a dialectic [page/Seite 39] move away from one another, like two sea monsters, spiting at each other with spirit [“Geist”] and poison, with books and with strikes [“Streiks”], and there where the latest creation from Schiaparelli indicates a major change in the fashion industry, with the latest model made from ash gray linen with pineapple yellow organdy. From all of this come colours, with indescribable nuances and quality [“valeur”]. From all of this comes the poem.

From all of this comes the poem, which perhaps draws to itself one of these torn hours: the absolute poem, the poem without faith, the poem without hope, which is made for no one, the poem of words, which are arranged so that they captivate [“faszinierend montieren”]. And, to say it again, who can only see behind this formulation nihilism and lasciviousness is neglecting the fact that behind captivation and language there exists much darkness and the decline of Being to satisfy the deep thinkers, that in every form that captivates there lives sufficient passionate substance, nature and tragic experience. But naturally, you abandon religion, you abandon the collective and decamp into entirely unknown fields. But what then sense does the eternal chit-chat about the crisis in our foundations and cultural catastrophe, which we quite unbearably have to endure, possess, if you do not want to recognise what it is all truly about, and when you are not prepared to take the necessary decision?

But you really must take this decision! Those forms of art that do not embrace their inner law and inner order lose the tension of their form [page/Seite 40] and collapse. Our order is the spirit; its law is called expression, formation, style. Everything else is decline., whether abstract, whether atonal, whether Surrealist. It is the law of form, the Ananke of expressive creating that lies over us. That is not simply a private opinion, a hobby horse of the lyrical self. It is a common opinion held by all working in this area: “a word weighs more than a victory”. Even the poem without faith even this poem without hope, even this poem that is meant for no one is transcendent; it is, to quote a French poet on this question: “the completion of an act of becoming, which is allocated to man, but which goes well beyond him”.

I know of others from within the ranks of modern lyrical poetry who would add their voices to this, calling for a return to such sentiments. T.S. Eliot, it is true, in his essay that appeared in the Merkur was of the opinion that such sentiments should come to an end, namely the continuation of self-consciousness [in poetry] and the intensification of knowledge about language. The efforts that go into this are extreme. But Eliot is also an opponent of the television and would like to see its growth stymied. I believe that he wrong in both cases. I believe that is basically deceiving himself. I am of the opinion that the phenomena of which we speak are irreversible, and rather than signifying the end the signify the beginning of a development.

I will now allow myself a short detour into a different area, which will shed new light on our thesis. It is genetics, the science of the future for mankind. Some people may be skeptical about manifold varying theories on the nature and origins of mankind, on the variable and [page/Seite 41] labile interpretations of fossils and intermediary findings, but its holding point at the moment is this: that mankind has no source but was there from the beginning and that he represents a new creationist condition. The essence of this condition is consciousness and spirit. The work of Gehlen, Portmann and Carrel have put this thinking on to a systematic basis. Man, Gehlen says, is an animal that has not yet been definitively established, he is open to impressions, capable of further development, and only at the beginning of the determination of the species. Most of his bodily functions have been reached; now the immaterial qualities diversify, are passed on and maintain themselves. The plasticity of this forming [“Werdens”] transmutes into a new dimension; the emancipation of the spirit gropes its way forward into a newly opened space. There is no talk about the loss of the middle {“Mitte”] there is no talk at all. Let us deduce from this with regards to our theme that the middle is replete with an inexhaustibility. Only indications of this have come to presence in our high culture so far, but the general direction of this middle is clear: it goes into the tensed sphere of consciousness and spirit, not in the direction of instinct, warm feeling, of a cultivated botanical-zoological idyl of the inner self, but in a linking of refined concepts, from the overcoming of the animal to intellectual formulations, in a productive diversion to clear earth-bound forms. It is the direction of a world that is seeking and is finding consciousness and expression, in one word: “abstraction”. Further than that, we cannot see. But mankind in all probability will not culminate as today’s cultural [page/Seite 42] melancholics see things. When he conducts himself in this fashion, he conducts himself in accordance with creative laws, which lie well beyond atomic bombs and clumps of ore from Uranus. Even Western man will not go under according to this train of thought. He has suffered, but he is stable and is able to develop unsuspected shaping strengths out of his partial destitution, not really because he has need of any further intensification but simply because he is aroused does the lyrical self follow this theory. It accords with his inner being [“Substanzen”], the inner self as it is at the moment, and this is directing him because for him there is no longer a Mecca or a Gethsemane, nor does the bas reliefs in the Khmei temple in Angor Vat lie within his purview. Keep on going further on to the Olympia of surface beauty [“Olymp des Scheins”]. Wherever there are people, gods will also dwell.

Just a few more rays of departure from the lyrical self and then we will be done with him. A signal is sent out to thinking at the turn of the age – but thinking at the turn of the age is already an intellectual-historical cliché. Do not say “apocalyptic”, it reads in the “Three Old Men”; do not say “apocalyptic”, “the seven-headed animal from the sea and the two-horned one from the earth were always there”. The absolute poem needs no new age. It is in a position to operate without time, just as the formulas of modern physics have long been doing. In connection with this is also the general view that the planetary “Talmiunität”] that technology is spreading throughout the world is without existential significance. There has always been technology, but most people remained ignorant of it. After all [page/Seite 43], Caeser travelled in six days very comfortably in his sleeping cars from Rome to Cologne, and the lighthouse at Coruna, built two thousand years ago, is still shining on the Bay of Biscay. When they turned on a water tap in the Rome of the Caesars, the water from the Ligurian Sea, forty kilometers away, poured into their bathtubs. We have not got things as far as that today. The first dugout canoe, in which one could travel in dry conditions over the water, was far more culturally sensational and important to the human race than all the U-boats. And when for the first time a blow pipe killed an animal with its arrow, so that one no longer had to grip it to kill it, time suddenly turned probably further back than the isotopes. We should not believe therefore that our feeling for life today is greater than in the cities of Alexandra, when Greek culture stretched from Athens to India, or on the ships of the Genoese and the Spaniards that sailed over the Atlantic for the first time.

But every now and then the lyrical self is capable of acquiring a quite extravagant impression [ of the world], something that he admits it to himself only with caution. He sometimes can’t resist the impression that it looks like the philosophers of today would essentially like to write poetry. Many of them feel that at the moment that discursive systematic thinking has reached an end, that consciousness is now something that thinks only in fragments, that disquisitions on truth consisting of five hundred pages, however relevant certain pages might be, are matched by a three-stanza poem. Philosophers feel this gentle earthquake but the relationship to the word is incomplete in them or has never become living [page/Seite 44] and hence they remain philosophers, but basically, they would like to be poets – all of them would like to write poetry. All of them would like to write the modern poem, which without doubt possesses a monologic character that stands out from virtual ontological vacuity, which lies above all mere entertainment and raises the question as to whether language still has at all a dialogical character in a metaphysical sense. Does it generate points of contact; does it bring transcendence; does it bring transformation? Or is language simply a material for business negotiations and a general symbol of our tragic decline? Negotiations, discussions: all just chit-chat, unworthy projections of private excitation. In our depths lies quietly that Other, which makes us but which we do not see. Mankind in its entirety is drained through such self-encounters, whoever encounters himself? Only a few, and then alone.

I am coming to my conclusion. I fear that I have not been able to tell you anything new. Speaking in a university faculty, as I have noticed in the titles of the lecture courses, where colleagues voice their views on the German lyric from Klopstock to Weinheber, on the structure of the poem and its means of expression and organise readings on modern poetry, in front of such a faculty, I can’t do anything that is so up to date. I can at the most make an observation that I am not really entitled to make but which, for the sake of completion, I don’t want to repress. And that is the fact that I personally don’t think that the modern poem is suited to public airing. It is neither in the interest of the poem nor in the [page/Seite 45] interest of the listener. The poem is best read in solitude. The recipient adopts right from the beginning a quite different position when he sees how long it is and how the stanzas are formed. When years ago, in the former Prussian Academy of Arts, of which I was a member, I gave readings of my poems, I said before every reading: now comes a poem that has, amongst other things, four stanzas and eight rhymes – the optical image supported my opinion of its likely reception. A modern poem needs to be printed on paper and needs to be read, requires black [print] letters. It becomes more plastic by being viewed through its external structure, and it becomes more inward when one in silence bends oneself over it. This bending over is necessary. I quote in this respect a French essay writer who wrote recently about the French lyric. He wrote that he found no other description of these authors in their totality than to say that they were all difficult poets.

In what I have said to now, I have perhaps been too rationalistic, rather too clear about certain relationships, perhaps also too severe. But, in general, this was not intentional. There is, it seems to me, broadly speaking, no other field that generates misunderstandings more than lyrical poetry. I have observed how clever people, important critics who write for the feuilletons, demonstrate a really great understanding for a great lyrical poet and have penetrating observations to make, devote in the next edition of that feuilleton the same understanding and make the same observations about an epigone who is not even of mediocre status. That seems to me to be like someone who can’t make a distinction between porcelain [page/Seite 46] from the Ming Dynasty and that unbreakable crockery used in the home and bought from the local department store. The reasons for this lie not in external considerations but in a lack of inner criteria. These critics continue to grope around with the assumption that a poem deals with feelings and should spread warmth – as if a thought is not a feeling, as if form is not an incomparable warmth that reaches very deeply into primitive man. These critics carry out their interpretations and quests for ambiguity at the cost of the pure poem. A new poem always means for the author taming a lion, and for the critics to look a lion in the eye, when they would much prefer to meet a donkey. But, I admit, there are many ways out [“Entlassungen”] for such critics. A poem is such a complex creation that it is very difficult to view it in all of its chains of association.

My words might have sounded too hard and too absolute in one further area. I imagine that here, sitting on one of the benches, is a young person who has just begun to write poetry, and for whom, through my words, a chill has fallen into his or her lyrical spring night. I should like to say to that person that this was not my intention. Only a few poems begin in a state of completion, and I will take my leave of you with I hope a conciliatory anecdote. I was eighteen when I began to study here in Marburg. That was in the first decade of this century. I studied Philology and attended the classes of Professor Ernst Elster, the editor of the first great Heine edition [page/Seite 47]. The title of his course was “Poetics and the Methodology of Literary History”. It was a stimulating and, by the standards of the day, also a highly modern course. Today, admittedly, literary methodology is more subtle, even extremely subtle, particularly in the area of reading prose, with its tendency to stylistic analysis and the exegesis of language. I was personally affected by this through a doctoral dissertation from the University of Bonn, which analyzed my early prose, but which came across to me something like a vivisection. Anyway, I attended the courses given by Elster and those on medieval poetry given by Professor Wrede, along with many other courses and I wanted to express my thanks to my alma mater, Philippina, for these two essential semesters through the talk that I have given today.

But back to the person on the bench! So, I was here, lived in number 10 Wilhelms Strasse. In Berlin, Lichterfelde, there was a journal that called itself Romanzeitung. They had a column in which poems that had been sent in anonymously were reviewed. I sent them some of my poems and waited, shaking, for their decision. It finally arrived and read: “friendly in disposition but weak in expression. However, send us some more in the future”. That was a long time ago and now I see that after several decades of writing I am reckoned amongst the so-called poets of expression, and in contrast my disposition now is found as decidedly unfriendly.

A talent can develop itself through work, and a talent can come to an end [“spät”]. My byword is: arrive at the end, achieve fame at the end. So, continue writing poetry believing that you have to tread the path towards those poems that I spoke about before. Take up the spear where we laid it was down, to use that image from Flaubert. You can be certain of public failures, internal devastations, days when you hardly know yourself, nights when you can no longer see into the future. But now go your own way and take, as all of you should take who have had the kindness to listen to me, as a departing note and as inspiration a grand maxim from Hegel, a spokesman truly of the Western world, spoken one hundred years ago, and which covers the entire complications of our fate in the middle of the Twentieth Century. The maxim reads: what matters is “not life that is scared of death and seeks to keep itself pure in the face of devastation, but that which one bears within and which within us keeps itself erect: the life of the spirit”.