“Trust me, the fountain of youth, it is no fable. It is running
Truly and always. Ye ask, where? In poetical art.”
—Friedrich Schiller, The Fountain of Second Youth
There are prophecies in every age. The doom of empires and the fall of kings remain perennial themes because of their timeless reality. Poets have often been the bearers of these prophecies; in Western civilized culture, this gift of poetical prophecy is chiefly the preserve of the tragic, epic, and biblical traditions. The verses of David’s psalms, the dactyls of Homer and the tercets of Dante immortalized poets’ thoughts and ensured their transmission through enduring poetical forms.
As the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry (1821):
Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.
In musical forms, the bards of old ensured their verses would phrase, not only man’s highest thoughts, but the common wisdom of all humankind. With respect to their poetical forms, Shelley wrote:
The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s “Paradise” would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more decisive.
When we consider the role played by poets in the rebirth of civilizations across the ages, particularly Classical Greece, little by way of civilizational rebirth has been left untouched by what Shelley referred to as poetry’s “secret alchemy”.
Schiller: A Window into Hellenism
As in any classical age, rebirth begins by intimately acquainting ourselves with the best of our tradition, and situating it within our own unique times. The 18th-century German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller thoroughly imbibed the wisdom and beauty of the Classical Greeks, and succeeded in reviving it within his own age, known as the Weimar Classical Renaissance.
Heralded as “the Shakespeare of Germany”, Schiller (1759–1805) presided over Germany’s illustrious classical revolution, alongside Goethe. Many of their poems served as inspirations for composers including Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. No less than Beethoven’s supreme Ninth Symphony was composed as a setting of Schiller’s “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy).
Of Schiller’s epic ballad the “Cranes of Ibykus”, the preeminent Classical philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote in 1797:
There is a greatness and a sublimity [in the Cranes], which is again completely their own. Especially from the moment the theater is mentioned, the depiction is godly. The painting of the amphitheater and the congregation is lively, great and clear, already the names of the peoples transpose one to such happier times, that I know of scarcely anything more magnificent for the fantasy. And then the chorus of the Eumenides, as it appears in its frightful greatness, wanders around the theater, and finally disappears, horrible even then. Here the language is at once so uniquely yours, and so appropriate for the task, that I can not deny that I felt, in the chorus, something greater and something even higher than in the Greek of Aeschylus, as closely as you have followed him. Already this language, this verse-style, even the rhyme scheme make that which is otherwise unique to modern works unite with antiquity. The sublimity for fantasy and heart, which is so unique to Greek expression, achieves here, I believe, an increased greatness for the mind… The Ibycus has… an extraordinary substance; it moves deeply; it shakes one; it fascinates, and one must come back to it again and again. Surprisingly beautiful are the transitions, and you succeeded very well in the difficult narration of the development.[1]
Through a reading of Schiller’s criticism and original works, modern readers discover an intimate view of Greek greatness through the eyes of one of the most successful revivers of Hellenism in modern history. Passionate about the achievements of Ancient Greece, Schiller observed that the Classical Greeks pioneered the tragic form as we know it, tracing its origins to the Greek chorus. He maintained that the chorus was the binding force of tragic drama, observing that even with its ostensible departure from the stage, the chorus remained the animating spirit of Greek theatre.
In On the Employment of Chorus in Tragedy, Schiller writes:
The tragedy of the Greeks, as we know, emerged from the chorus. And although it cut itself loose from the chorus historically and in the course of time, one can also say that it emerged from the chorus poetically and in spirit, and that without this perseverant witness and bearer of the action, it would have become an entirely different poetry… Ancient tragedy, which initially dealt only with gods, heroes, and kings, required the chorus as a necessary accompaniment; it found it in nature, and employed it because it found it.[2]
He goes on to discuss the relevance of the chorus principle for modern tragedy and poetry:
The actions and fates of the heroes and kings are public in and of themselves, and were even more so in simple, primal time. The chorus, thus, was more than a natural organ in ancient tragedy; it followed out of the poetical form of real life. In modern tragedy, it becomes an artificial organ, it helps to bring poetry forth… For the modern poet, therefore, the chorus performs a far more essential service than it did for the ancient poet, and just for the very reason that it transforms the common modern world int the ancient poetical one, because it makes everything useless which contends against poetry, and drives him aloft to the most simple, the most original, and most naïve motifs.
Finally he concludes:
The palaces of the kings are now closed; the courts have withdrawn from the gates of the city into the inner courts of the buildings; writing has displaced the living word; the people itself, the sensuous, living mass, where it does not make itself felt as raw power, has become the state, and thus become a derivative conception; the gods have returned within the breasts of people. The poet must open the palaces once again; he must conduct the courts out under the open heavens; he must resurrect the gods; he must reestablish everything immediate, which has been annulled by the artificial edifice of real life; and he must cast off all artificial concoctions of the person and around him, everything which hinders original character, as a sculptor casts off modern robes, and he must take nothing of the external environment except that which makes the highest of forms, the human form, visible.
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