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33 ◆ The PoeT and our Time ◆ A Lecture In “The Poet and Our Time” (1906), Hofmannsthal reflects on the way in which the intellectual clarifications of a writer are different from the arguments of a philosopher : not making the conceptual claims of the philosopher of aesthetics, but trying to map our inner lives and processes and to make us aware of new ways of seeing them. It is useful to keep this in mind in reading all of Hofmannsthal’s essays , but this address is important above all to clarify his view of the situation of European culture before the war, especially for the generation that reached maturity in the decade before 1914. Despite his later interests in politics, the war, and the Austrian idea, Hofmannsthal never moved away from this basic understanding of his task as a writer. His presentation here1 has an element of theater since he is thinking quite explicitly of presenting his ideas as a speaker to an educated audience. Here and elsewhere, Hofmannsthal aimed to address educated people generally and not just a few aesthetically sophisticated initiates. Somewhat paradoxically , this essay on the poet is largely about the modern reader and how the experience of reading had changed over the previous century. You have been told that I want to talk with you about the poet [Dichter]2 and our time, about the presence of the writer or of the poetic element in our time; and I understand that some announcements have posed the theme even more seriously, speaking of the problem of poetic existence in the contemporary world. These art-words already border on the territory of technical philosophy and force me to disclaim from the outset all expectations that go in this direction, which I would otherwise cruelly disappoint in the course of this hour. I am utterly without the means or even the intention to practice philosophy of art of any kind. I will not undertake to enrich your store of concepts by so much as a single new one. Nor will I attempt to criticize one of the established concepts on which your perception of these aesthetic matters may rest, as if they depended on concepts and not, as I secretly and confidently hope, on a chaotic mixture of confused, complex, and incommensurable inner experiences . . . , no, I will not attempt to do anything 34 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea of the kind. It is not my ambition to rearrange these inner boundaries, but simply to emerge from them at as many different points as possible, and as unexpectedly as possible, and thus to startle you in a not unpleasant way. I mean simply: it would please me if I managed to make palpable for you that this theme does not have a merely artificial existence, measured by the minutes in this hour, in the atmosphere of this gathering, in this artificial light, but touches on a dimension of your spiritual existence, which is there in a thousand moments of your lives not as something known, but as something felt and lived, and radiating influence. We need not dwell on the concept of the present: you, like me, are citizens of this age; its myriad intersecting oscillations constitute the atmosphere in which I speak to you, in which you hear me, and into which we once again go out when we leave this hall. It even rules our dreams and gives them their blend of colors; and only in deep, deathlike sleep do we believe that we have escaped it. I know the concept of the poet you bring to me as something that rests firmly and fully formed within you. Something pulses in it of the shape that German poets gave to it at the beginning of the past century (to whom we should not continue to refer with such an inadequate and blunt word as the “Romantics”); but the power that the tremendous idea of Goethe holds over your souls propels this idea into the hardly conceivable; and there is something of the pathetic phenomenon of Hölderlin among the oscillating elements that constitute in you the concept of the poet, and something of the unforgettable allure of Byron; something of the lost and nameless discoverers of an old German song and something of Pindar.3 You think of Shakespeare, and next to that everything else is extinguished for an inner moment, but the next moment the unending, complexly oscillating conceptual formation is restored again, and you think...

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