Page:Poet Lore, volume 34, 1923.djvu/304



O the English-speakngspeaking [sic] reader who is versed in modern lyric poetry, the name of the Rhenish Catholic poet, Stefan George, born in Budesheim, Hessia, in 1865, may be known, but only serious students of the lyric and those who read German with great facility will profess acquaintance with his work. George, one of the most baffling of modern poets, is a symbolist whose paramount dogma is art for art's sake. He and the little circle that gathered about him during the early nineties in the periodical Blatter für die Kunst, most of the members of which have become renegades, made it their aim to resolve, as a chemist would a compound, all their experiences into pure lyric sentiment of the greatest possible pregnancy and to deal not in reflection but in presentation, to afford not entertainment but to give impressions. The result is that it usually becomes very difficult to fathom the basic thought which prompted the author to write. Exquisite beauty of form, remarkable verbal and rimic skill, harmoniousness of sound, aristocratism, are the strong points of George. Hardenberg and the early German Romanticists, also Jens Peter Jacobsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire may be called his predecessors.

Great difference exists among critics with regard to his rank, some calling him a downright poseur and a euphuist, others, among them, Kuno Zeymann, his interpreter, and Ludwig Lewisohn styling him the foremost lyrical poet in Europe. Although neither party may have judged him quite correctly, his admirers are probably nearer to the truth, for a poet who has consistently practised such rigid self-discipline as George, who is so uncompromising an idealist as he is, can hardly be called a poseur, although he may be lacking in humor. He has been severely criticised for his practise of frightening away casual readers and the All-too-Many, as he calls the multitude, mystifying them by arbitrary symbolism and arbitrary punctuation, to say nothing of his philologically justifiable system of capitalization. But it is