/lit/ - Literature

>>19489103
>The old world, speaking strictly, knew but one poet, and named him "Homeros." The Greek word "Poietes," which [138] the Latins—unable to translate it—reproduced as "Poeta," recurs most naïvely among the Provençals as "Trouvère," and suggested to our Middle-high Germans the term of "Finder," Gottfried von Strassburg calling the poet of Parzival a "Finder wilder Märe" ("finder of strange tales"). That "poietes"—of whom Plato averred that he had found for the Greeks their gods—would seem to have been preceded by the "Seer," much as the vision of that ecstatic shewed to Dante the way through Hell and Heaven. But the prodigy of the Greeks' sole poet—"the"—seems to have been that he was seer and poet in one; wherefore also they represented him as blind, like Tiresias. Whom the gods meant to see no semblance, but the very essence of the world, they sealed his eyes; that he might open to the sight of mortals that truth which, seated in Plato's figurative cavern with their backs turned outwards, they theretofore could see in nothing but the shadows cast by Show, This poet, as "seer," saw not the actual (das Wirkliche), but the true (das Wahrhaftige), sublime above all actuality; and the fact of his being able to relate it so faithfully to hearkening men that to them it seemed as clear and tangible as anything their hands had ever seized—this turned the Seer to a Poet.
>Was he "Artist" also?
>Whoso should seek to demonstrate the art of Homer, would have as hard a task before him as if he undertook to shew the genesis of a human being by the laborious experiments of some Professor—supramundane, if you will—of Chemistry and Physics. Nevertheless the work of Homer is no unconscious fashioning of Nature's, but something infinitely higher; perhaps, the plainest manifestation of a godlike knowledge of all that lives. Yet Homer was no Artist, but rather all succeeding poets took their art from him, and therefore is he called "the Father of Poetry" (Dichtkunst). All Greek genius is nothing else than an artistic réchauffé (Nachdichtung) of Homer; for purpose of this réchauffé, was first discovered and matured that "Techne" which at last we have raised to a general principle under name of the Art of Poetry, wrongheadedly including in it the "poietes" or "Finder der Märe."

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>>19489240
>The "ars poetica" of the Latins may rank as art, and from it be derived the whole artifice of verse-and-rhyme-making to our present day. If Dante once again was dowered with the Seer's eye—for he saw the Divine, though not the moving shapes of gods, as Homer—when we come to Ariosto things have faded to the fanciful refractions of Appearance; whereas Cervantes spied between the glintings of such arbitrary fancies the old-poetic world-soul's cloven quick, and sets that cleavage palpably before us in the lifelike actions of two figures seen in dream. And then, as if at Time's last stroke, a Scotsman's "second sight" grows clear to full clairvoyance of a world of history now lying lost behind us in forgotten documents, and its facts he tells to us as truthful fairy-tales told cheerily to listening children. But from that ars poetica, to which these rare ones owed no jot, has issued all that calls itself since Homer "Epic poetry"; and after him we have to seek the genuine epic fount in tales and sagas of the Folk alone, where we find it still entirely undisturbed by art.
>To be sure, what nowadays advances from the feuilleton to clothe the walls of circulating libraries, has had to do with neither art nor poesy. The actually-experienced has at no time been able to serve as stuff for epic narration; and "second sight" for the never-witnessed does not bestow itself on the first romancer who passes by. A critic once blamed the departed Gutzkow for depicting a poet's love-affairs with baronesses and countesses, "things of which he certainly could never have had any personal experience"; the author most indignantly replied by thinly-veiled allu sions to similar episodes that actually had happened to himself. On neither side could the unseemly folly of our novel-writing have been more cryingly exposed.—Goethe, on the other hand, proceeded in his "Wilhelm Meister" as the artist to whom the poet had refused his collaboration in discovery of a satisfactory ending; in his "Wahlverwandtschaften" the lyric elegist worked himself into a seer of souls, but not as yet of living shapes. But what Cervantes had seen as Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, dawned on Goethe's deep world-scrutiny as Faust and Mephistopheles; and these shapes beheld by his ownest eye now haunt the seeking artist as the riddle of an ineffable poet's-dream, which he thought, quite un-artistically but thoroughly sincerely, to solve in an impossible drama.

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>>19489246
>There may be something to learn from this, even for our members of the "German Poets'-grove" who feel neglected by their none too ardent publishers. For alas! one must say of their novels, their spirit's ripest fruits, that they have sprung from neither life nor tradition, but simply from theft and traduction. If neither the Greeks at their prime, nor any later great nation of culture, such as the Italians and Spaniards, could win from passing incidents the matter for an epic story, to you moderns this will presumably come a trifle harder: for the events they witnessed, at least were real phenomena; whilst ye, in all that rules, surrounds and dwells in you, can witness naught but masquerades tricked out with rags of culture from the wardrobe-shop and tags from the historical marine-store. The seer's eye for the ne'er-experienced the gods have always lent to none but their believers, as ye may ascertain from Homer or Dante. But ye have neither faith nor godliness.
- Wagner, On Poetry and Composition