Born: Büdesheim, Germany; July 12, 1868
Died: Minusio, Switzerland; December 4, 1933
PRINCIPAL POETRY
Hymnen, 1890
Pilgerfahrten, 1891 (Pilgrimages, 1949)
Algabal, 1892 (English translation, 1949)
Die Bücher der Hirten-und Preisgedichte, der Sagen und Sänge und der hängenden Gärten, 1895 (The Books of Eclogues and Eulogies, of Legends and Lays, and of the Hanging Gardens, 1949)
Das Jahr der Seele, 1897 (The Year of the Soul, 1949)
Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod, mit einem Vorspiel, 1899 (Prelude, The Tapestry of Life, The Songs of Dream and Death, 1949)
Die Fibel, 1901 (The Primer, 1949)
Der siebente Ring, 1907 (The Seventh Ring, 1949)
Der Stern des Bundes, 1914 (The Star of the Covenant, 1949)
Das neue Reich, 1928 (The Kingdom Come, 1949)
The Works of Stefan George, 1949 (includes the English translations of all titles listed above)
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
Of the books written by Stefan George (gay-AWR-guh), only Tage und Taten (1903; Days and Deeds, 1951) does not contain any poetry. The volume is a collection of miscellaneous small prose: sketches, letters, observations, aphorisms, and panegyrics. It was expanded to include the introductory essay from Maximin, ein Gedenkbuch (1906; memorial book for Maximin) for the eighteen-volume edition of George’s complete works, Gesamt-Ausgabe, published between 1927 and 1934. In addition to his original works, George published five volumes of translations and adaptations: Baudelaire, Die Blumen des Bösen (1901; of Charles Baudelaire); Zeitgenössische Dichter (1905; of contemporary poets); Shakespeare, Sonnette (1909; of William Shakespeare) and Dante, Die göttliche Komödie, Übertragungen (1909; of Dante). Zeitgenössische Dichter contains George’s translations of poetry by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Albert Verwey, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and others. Editions of George’s correspondence with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Friedrich Gundolf were published in 1938 and 1962, respectively.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Most of Stefan George’s works were consciously addressed to a carefully selected and limited readership, and until 1898, his lyric cycles were published only in private, limited editions. Poems that appeared in early issues of Blätter für die Kunst (leaves for art) were initially ignored in Germany because of the journal’s limited circulation, the general obscurity of its contributors, and the poets’ lack of connections with accepted literary circles. However, George’s early poems and translations were received very favorably by poets and critics in France and Belgium. In 1898, the first public edition of The Year of the Soul, still his most popular cycle of poems, brought George the beginnings of broader recognition. Subsequent collections won him increasing acclaim for his originality and artistic virtuosity, until in 1927, he became the first, if reluctant, recipient of the Frankfurt/Main Goethe Prize. By 1928, when his collected works appeared, George was recognized internationally as the most gifted of the German Symbolist poets and the most influential renewer of the German language since Friedrich Nietzsche.
George’s important contributions to modern German poetry resulted from his efforts to revitalize and elevate decaying artistic standards. His efforts in cultivating a new literary language took into account contemporary literary influences from other national literatures. While pursuing his goals, he actively encouraged other German poets, including Hofmannsthal, Leopold von Andrian, and Karl Wolfskehl, to strive for a new idealism focused on truth, originality, and self-examination, rejecting the identification of poetry with the personality of the poet and his experiences that had long characterized the nineteenth century imitators of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In 1933, when the Nazis endeavored to distort and exploit his artistic ideals, George refused their offers of money and honor, including the presidency of the German Academy of Poets. Nevertheless, after his death, misinterpretation of his ideas and attitudes regarding artistic and intellectual elitism established a link with Nazi ideology that reduced his literary stature and for many years deprived him of his rightful place in German literary history. Above all else, George was a poet of uncompromising artistic integrity, whose attempts to give German poetry a new direction of humanism and idealism were prompted by profoundly moral and ethical motives.
BIOGRAPHY
Stefan Anton George was born in Büdesheim near Bingen in the Rhine district of Germany. His ancestors were farmers, millers, and merchants. When George was five years old, his father, a wine dealer, moved the family to Bingen. Bingen had a lasting impact on the poet’s imagination, and its landscapes informed much of his early poetry. In 1882, George began his secondary education in Darmstadt. He received broad humanistic training and excelled in French. While in school, he taught himself Norwegian and Italian and began translating works by Henrik Ibsen, Petrarch, and Torquato Tasso. When he was eighteen, he began writing poetry and published some of his earliest lyrics under the pseudonym Edmund Delorme in the journal Rosen und Disteln that he had founded in 1887.
Upon leaving school in 1888, George began the travels that later characterized his lifestyle. He went first to London, where he became acquainted with the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, and Ernest Dowson, whose poems he later translated and published in German. In Paris, in 1889, he met the French poet Albert Saint-Paul, who introduced him into the circle of Symbolist poets surrounding Mallarmé. In this group of congenial literary artists, which included Verlaine, Francis Vielé-Griffen, the Belgian Albert Mockel, and the Polish poet Wacuaw Rolicz-Lieder, George found needed personal acceptance and friendship as well as important poetic models. Verlaine and Mallarmé became his acknowledged masters and provided him with a sense of his own poetic calling.
After returning to Germany, George studied Romance literature for three semesters in Berlin. During this time, he experimented with language and even developed a personal Lingua Romana that combined Spanish and Latin words with German syntactical forms. In 1890, he published his first book of poems, Odes, in a private edition. Two years later, with Carl August Klein, he founded Blätter für die Kunst, which served as an initial focus for his circle of disciples and remained a major vehicle for his ideas for twenty-seven years.
Other encounters with contemporary writers and artists, with his own disciples, and with other personal friends had decisive formative influence on George’s career. In 1891, he began a productive if frequently stormy friendship with Hofmannsthal, whom he viewed as his only kindred spirit among modern German poets. When Hofmannsthal refused to commit himself exclusively to George’s literary ideas, their association broke off in 1906. George’s only significant relationship with a woman, a friendship with Ida Coblenz (later the wife of Richard Dehmel), began in 1892 and influenced many of the poems in The Year of the Soul, which he originally intended to dedicate to her. After their association ended in disappointment for George, he limited his emotional involvement to young male disciples, among whom Gundolf and Maximilian Kronberger had profound impact on his mature poetry. Although George was gay, his relations with his young disciples may have been platonic. Affection for Gundolf moved George to direct his creative attention toward molding German youth, while Kronberger, a beautiful adolescent who died of meningitis in 1904, provided him with a model for the divinely pure power of youth as an absolute force of life.
By 1920, most of George’s poetic works had been completed. He spent his remaining years actively guiding his youngest disciples, working more as a master teacher than as a poet. When his health finally failed, he moved to Minusio near Locarno, Switzerland, where he died on December 4, 1933.
ANALYSIS
In the preface to the first issue of Blätter für die Kunst, Stefan George defined artistic goals for the journal that gave direction to his own poetry for the rest of his career. With its high literary standards, its personally selected group of contributors, and its carefully formulated program, Blätter für die Kunst was intended to be a force in the creation of a new German poetry. Its express purpose, specifically reflecting George’s perception of his own poetic calling, was to foster a newly refined and spiritual form of literature based on a rejuvenation of classical ideals and a revival of pure literary language. Poetry thus engendered was to be a manifestation of a new way of feeling, furthering the quest for permanent values while rejecting any idea of literature as simple diversion, political instrument, or vehicle for naturalistic social criticism. George’s ultimate goal was to provide artistic leadership for a generation that would build a new humanistic society embodying Platonic ideals of goodness, truth, and beauty. Everything that George wrote was directed toward the accomplishment of these purposes.
Intimate association with the French Symbolists in Paris was the formative experience of George’s career. It provided him with models for his approach and technique, ideas concerning the poet’s role in life, and a starting point for the lifelong exploration of his own poetic nature and its delineation in his works. From Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, he learned to view poets as mediators between phenomena and literary art who describe their perceptions using symbolism that is understood completely only by the poets themselves. Through their symbolic creations, the poet thus isolate themselves in a world to which their own spiritual identity provides the key, a key that the reader must seek in the poem. In this regard, it is important to understand that George completely rejected the idea of identity between the poetic and the personal self. The progressive revelations in his lyrics of the poet’s role in life are therefore idealizations rather than reflections of experience.
A clearly defined process of strengthening, refinement, and crystallization of the poet’s role emerges in the cycles that document George’s development. His Odes, which belong within the frame of traditional idealism, examine such themes as the tension between reason and feeling, change as a basic force in life, and unhappy love and death; therein is revealed a personal struggle with self-examination and doubt. In Algabal, however, there is a new sense of personal validity; the title figure symbolizes the exclusive artist who creates a private realm in isolation from nature. A further objectification of poetic self appears in the prologue to The Tapestry of Life, in the figure of an angel. This alter ego of the poet appears not as a heavenly messenger but as a representative of life, announcing the colorful fabric of the artistic yet puzzling order of existence. George’s attempts to refine and perfect the revelation of his poetic identity culminate in the Maximin poems of The Seventh Ring and The Star of the Covenant, in which Maximin becomes the ultimate symbol for the desired perfect fusion of body and spirit in self-awareness.
Central to George’s view of the social role of the poet was the idea that the poet enjoys the special position of “master” within a circle of devoted disciples. This principle, which he saw modeled in the salon of Mallarmé, had significant impact on his poetry and the conduct of his personal life. The relationship of the poet to his disciples is reflected in poems dedicated to close friends and associates in The Books of Eclogues and Eulogies, of Legends and Lays, and of the Hanging Gardens and other cycles. It is also evident in the consistent emergence of the symbolic poet as a teacher figure. This casting of the poet in the role of educator is readily visible in poems from The Year of the Soul and in the “Zeitgedichte” (“Time Poems”) section of The Seventh Ring, in which the poet-teacher gives specific directions to his contemporaries, suggesting appropriate models for them to emulate. Developed to its ultimate in The Kingdom Come, the poet’s role as teacher becomes that of a prophet who judges the age and sounds a warning.
From the standpoint of technique and approach, George considered the revitalization, refinement, and purification of literary language to be the most important aspect of his creative task. He protested against the debasement of language, advocating a revival of pure rhyme and meter with precise arrangement of vowels and consonants to achieve harmony in a distinctly musical poetic form. Creation of language became a basic principle of his writing. He followed the pattern of Mallarmé and rejected everyday words. Stressing the importance of sound and internal melody in his poems, he formed new, musically resonant words and imbued his verses with rich vowels, assonances, alliteration, and double rhymes. George’s perception of the spoken and the written word as embodiments of the reality of the world extended even to a regard for the importance of the visual impression created by printed forms. To offer language that was unusual in this respect, he developed a special typeface and modified traditional orthography and punctuation for his publications. George undertook all these measures because he believed that language alone can open hidden levels of mind, soul, and meaning.
While progressively modifying French Symbolist and other external influences to suit his own purposes, George succeeded at least partially in creating the new German poetry toward which he was striving. Patterning his poems after Baudelaire’s perception of the symbolic structure of existence, he created works that reflected his personal attitudes of austerity and self-denial, while celebrating the ethical supremacy of the spirit over material existence. The poetic cycle became his characteristic form, and each of his collections exhibits the basic unity that it demands. In addition to genuine originality in the coining of words and in imagery, George’s poems typically feature colorful calmness of motion, sensually intense metaphors and symbols, and remarkable simplicity. The unaffected wording and ordering of lines in The Year of the Soul, for example, anticipate certain tendencies in Surrealism , while the smoothly flowing verses of the “Gezeiten” (“Tides”) section of The Seventh Ring and the utter clarity and lack of ambiguity in the poems of The Star of the Covenant reflect the complete creative control of words that George consistently demonstrated in his poetry. It is perhaps in that rare mastery of personal poetic language that George made his greatest contribution to German literature.
Even George’s earliest, less successful cycles reflect searching attempts to define his poetic self. From the exploratory Odes, which focus on artistic experiences and on the mission and position of the artists in the world, George moved in Pilgrimages toward a more distinctly personal approach to self-examination, styling himself a wanderer in a manner somewhat akin to Goethe’s poetic perception of himself. Not until Algabal, however, did he present a clearly cohesive symbolic representation of his own special nature.
ALGABAL
As George’s first highly characteristic work, Algabal offers vivid examples of the new kind of poetic creation for which the poet pleaded in the first issue of Blätter für die Kunst. The poems of Algabal are replete with samples of the musical language that became such a critical part of George’s works as a whole. In uniquely worded verses characterized by sonorous repetition of melodic vowel combinations, the poet transforms carefully chosen elements of reality into symbols for his internal world. In so doing, he gives them a different kind of existence, creating new levels of artistic revelation. He develops the central complex of symbols from the life of Elagabalus, the youthful Roman emperor and priest of Baal whose promotion of physically beautiful favorites and open homosexual orgies brought about his assassination. Transforming his eccentric model into Algabal, the lonely king of a personally created subterranean realm, George creates a haunting symbol for his poetic identity.
The first section of the cycle, “Im Unterreich” (“In the Subterranean Kingdom”), focuses on Algabal’s domain as a major symbol for a new level of creative feeling. In an overwhelming intensity of visual impression, the components of external nature are transformed into precious gems that flash in bright colors, illuminating from within an edifice to which the light of day does not penetrate. Similarly, the natural smells of outside reality are replaced by peculiar, musty fragrances of amber, incense, lemon, and almond oil that infuse the artificial world. The most profound symbols of “In the Subterranean Kingdom” are the lifeless birds and plants of Algabal’s garden. Amid stems and branches made of carbon, the black flower appears as a symbol for art, a conscious contrast to Novalis’s blue flower of romantic longing.
In the other sections of Algabal, “Tage” (“Days”), “Die Andenken” (“The Memories”), and “Vogelschau” (“View of Birds”), George tightens the symbolic focus to elucidate the unique personality of the ruler of the underground palace and garden. Verses that stress the self-examination aspect of the creative process reveal George’s perception of himself as a poet whose nature compels him to return alone to an ancient age in which other values predominate. New symbols are formed to treat traditional literary themes. Juxtaposed to the black flower of artificial life, for example, are images of death in vivid reds and greens. “View of Birds,” the final poem of the cycle, underscores the idea that it is only through the poet’s actively formative power of perception that life is given to the artistically constructed poetic world.
THE YEAR OF THE SOUL
Among all George’s collections of poetry, the most popular yet least typical is the key cycle of his middle period, The Year of the Soul. Two factors in particular distinguish the poems of this group from his other major works. The Year of the Soul is George’s only book that centers on love between man and woman. It is an important document of his relationship with Coblenz. His poetic treatment of that ultimately unhappy emotional involvement contrasts markedly with the harmoniously warm and human love poems that he wrote for young men in The Seventh Ring and other later cycles. The Year of the Soul also differs from other George volumes in style and technique. The decorative stylization of diction and the boldness of ornamentation in nature imagery suggest a connection with the intentions and motifs of Jugendstil, whereas the pronounced simplicity of form that characterizes most of George’s poetry reflects his tacit rejection of the Jugendstil tendency in art.
The poems of The Year of the Soul frame exploration of the problems of unfulfilled love in carefully controlled images of external reality. Modifying the traditional German nature poem, George symbolizes nature by a cultivated park that is organized and created by the gardener/poet. The park landscapes that he evokes offer individual natural phenomena as symbols for private experience and moods of the soul.
The first and most important of the book’s three major sections presents the essence of the volume in concentrated form. It is divided into three subcycles, “Nach der Lese” (“After the Harvest”), “Waller im Schnee” (“Wanderer in the Snow”), and “Sieg des Sommers” (“Triumph of Summer”), each of which constitutes a rounded unit in its own right. Beginning with autumn, the poet employs the rhythm of the seasons to illuminate changing moods—hope, suffering, reflection, and mourning in an ever-renewing confrontation with the self. Special emphasis on color accents the varying moods evoked by the nature images, intensifying the dialogue between “I” and “you,” newly perceived Faustian aspects of the poet’s own soul which appear in the guise of the poet and a fictitious female object of his love. The motifs of “Wanderer in the Snow” augment the tension between the poet and the accompanying “you” as the wanderer traverses a winter of bitterness, austerity, and mourning. Sheer hopelessness radiates from the lines of the seventh poem, in which the poet declares that despite his faithful attention and patience, his love relationship will never bring him so much as a warm greeting. In “Triumph of Summer,” a transition from the harsh emptiness of winter imagery to the anticipated warmth of summer promises a new approach to spiritual fulfillment. The ten poems of this segment dwell on the idea of joint creation of a “sun kingdom” with the “you” of the previous sections. The “sun kingdom,” a symbol for the ideal realm for which George longed throughout his career, remains, however, a transitory vision as summer’s end becomes a symbol for final parting.
The poems of the two other major parts of The Year of the Soul, “Überschriften und Widmungen” (“Titles and Dedications”) and “Traurige Tänze” (“Sad Dances”), focus more precisely and personally on problems and themes introduced in the preceding section. In verses dedicated to friends, the poet again assumes the role of teacher, instructing his disciples concerning the inner spiritual encounter with love. Lyrics written specifically for Coblenz give additional substance to the symbolic portrayal of George’s painful love affair, while the beautifully songlike stanzas of “Sad Dances” elevate the volume as a whole to a single powerful symbol for his private experience of Welt-schmerz.
THE SEVENTH RING
In 1907, George published the richest, most ambitious, and most complex collection of his career. The Seventh Ring represents the high point and culmination of his poetic development. It is especially fascinating for its presentation of a significant spectrum of George’s stylistic possibilities, themes, and poetic perceptions, together with its clear revelation of his ultimate goals. In addition to the ever-present poems dedicated to members of his circle, the cycle contains the most important elements of the new tendencies that appeared in George’s poetry after 1900. To be sure, the two later volumes, The Star of the Covenant and The Kindgom Come, are important for what they reveal of the final perfecting of ideas that are central to The Seventh Ring. Nevertheless, the sometimes sterile rigidity and flatness of The Star of the Covenant and the lack of uniformity in The Kingdom Come (which encompasses all of George’s lyric creations written after 1913) render those two books anticlimactic.
Although The Seventh Ring is somewhat uneven in form, a fresh poetic emphasis on principles of mathematical order is evident in the highly visible relationships between special numbers, internal symbolism, and the formal organization of the work. There are obvious connections among the title, the division of the poems into seven groupings, the seven biblical creative periods, and the year of publication, 1907. In addition, the number of items in each subcycle is a multiple of seven, while the constitution of individual poems and their integration into units are governed by specific numerical factors. Especially important is the placement of the “Maximin” section. Positioned fourth in conscious reference to the year of the death of Maximilian Kronberger, the verses that he inspired form the thematic as well as the structural nucleus of the symmetrical collection.
Viewed in its entirety, The Seventh Ring is George’s most comprehensive attempt to define his own position within his age. The “Time Poems” at the beginning permanently establish the poet in the chosen roles of teacher and judge that characterize all his later writings. They attack the follies of the era, providing points of reference and standards against which to measure them as well as models for emulation in building a new, ideal, Hellenistic society. Goethe, Dante, Nietzsche, and Leo XIII are among the examples of great human beings whom George glorifies. In “Tides,” which contains some of the most impressive love poetry in the German language, George reveals as nowhere else the intensity and inner meaning of his feelings for Gundolf and Robert Boehringer. Through the same lyrics, however, he comes to terms with the fact that those relationships have been replaced in importance by the more transcendent encounter with Maximin.
The so-called Maximin experience is commonly recognized as the key to George’s mature poetry. In the “Maximin” section of The Seventh Ring, George transforms the life of his young friend into a symbol for the manner in which eternal, divine forces are manifest in the modern world. Deification of Maximin enables him to create a private religion as part of his quest for permanent values in the Hellenic tradition. The god Maximin is the embodiment of a primeval force, a universally present Eros. In lyrical celebrations of Maximin’s life and death, George transforms the characteristic dialogues with self of earlier poems into conversations with divinity. In so doing, he elevates himself to the rank of prophet and seer. His prophetic calling then opens the way to new themes of chaos and destruction. While developing these themes, the poet creates the visions of Germany’s fall that accompany the further revelation of Maximin’s character in the other sections of The Seventh Ring and in The Star of the Covenant and The Kingdom Come.
OTHER MAJOR WORKS
NONFICTION: Blätter für die Kunst, 1892-1919 (12 volumes); Tage und Taten, 1903 (Days and Deeds, 1951); Maximin, ein Gedenkbuch, 1906.
TRANSLATIONS: Baudelaire, Die Blumen des Bösen, 1901; Zeitgenössische Dichter, 1905 (of contemporary poets); Dante, Die göttliche Komödie, Übertragungen, 1909; Shakespeare, Sonnette, 1909.
MISCELLANEOUS: Gesamt-Ausgabe, 1927-1934 (18 volumes; poetry and prose).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bennett, Edwin K. Stefan George. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954. A succinct critical study of George’s works with a brief biographical background. Includes bibliography.
Goldsmith, Ulrich K. Stefan George. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Biographical essay with bibliographic references.
Metzger, Michael M., and Erika A. Metzger. Stefan George. New York: Twayne, 1972. Biography of George includes a bibliography of his works.
Norton, Robert E. Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. This biography of George looks at him as a poet, a pedagogue, politician, and prophet. George and his circle were a very powerful political force in Germany, and he was viewed as the prophet and savior of the nation. One section is devoted to his poetry.
Rieckmann, Jens, ed. A Companion to the Works of Stefan George. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005. Contains essays on George’s poetics, his early works, his links to aestheticism, his relation to Friedrich Nietzsche and Nazism, his sexuality, and his literary circle. Also features a list of his works.
Underwood, Von Edward. A History That Includes the Self: Essays on the Poetry of Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. New York: Garland, 1988. A very useful monograph on the comparative poetics of the four poets. Bibliographical references, index.
Lowell A. Bangerter