Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Band 51. Heft 1

The article resumes the discussion on the relation of absolute music and language. Firstly, a critical look is taken at the two current theses: that music bears no meaning, or rather, that music is meaningful analogue to language. The second step describes the concept that processes conferring meaning upon music do not differ from corresponding processes regarding language. In a further step, however, the case is made that the structure of sound concatenations follows different principles concerning music on the one hand and language on the other, so that ›meaning‹ should be considered as a separate category with regard to music and language. Finally, the article tries to shed a new light on the particular affinity of the language of poetry to music.

The characterization of the poetic act as a state of irrationality and ecstasis does not, as Plato pretends (followed by many interpreters until today), correspond to the oldest ancient Greek tradition – allegedly documented by the earlier poets as well –, but is Plato’s invention. As part of this invention Plato identifies for the first time in history poetical inspiration with divine possession. Plato’s subversive invention of the mad poet is the basis for his model of the philosopher who himself shall dispose of enthusiasm, as the poet does, but who shall moreover dispose of intellectuality.

In his ›Historia ecclesiastica‹, Beda Venerabilis presents the origins of English literary history and the vocation of the first English poet within the context of non-Christian inspiration. The article argues that the irritating fact that Beda omits the original wording of the first Old English poem and gives a Latin paraphrase instead, is part of a strategy to defy the pagan implications of inspiration and to christianize the semantics of vernacular poetry.

Hymnic poetry needs inspiration. In the ›Feiertagshymne‹, Hölderlin differentiates several historical stages (night, dawn, holiday), degrees (deficiency, favour, rapture) and representations of inspiration or enthusiasm. The poetological reflexion includes mediating figures (Semele, Dionysos, Christus) and models (Pindar, Klopstock). While the poem turns away from eschatological inspiration it projects, by the simile at the beginning, a gesture of exploration which is followed up later by Hölderlin’s last hymns. For those this poem is of fundamental significance.

As Baudelaire’s poetics are founded in an understanding of inspiration as an expression of reflexion, they coin the fundamentals of modern aesthetics. In another perspective, these poetics are linked to an epistemological tradition, in which ›enthousiasmos‹ as the subjective capacity of mind does not only intend to assimilate itself to the idea, but claims to give form to the idea by its own creativity. The preforms of this thought might be found in Neo-Platonism, respectively in its early modern remodelling in Bruno’s ›Eroici Furori‹ that award metaphysical qualities to the intellect as an ›infinite movement‹, taking in account that this movement does no longer target the cognition of intelligibility, but produces intelligibility by itself.

In his poem ›Toast funébre‹, Mallarmé gives a form to the commemoration of the dead poet Théophile Gautier by confronting the religious practice with the art of the word in a programmatic and strictly antithetic manner. To renounce the former implies to achieve the latter. Religion consists of empty forms; a play with phantoms shows, in the realm of cosmic wings, the absurdity of the beyond. Language opens a sphere for innerwordly transcendency which is accomplished in artistic modernity on the basis of cathartic atheism.

The concept of inspiration occupies a central position in the realm of Proust’s self-reflexive evaluation of artistic production (as can be demonstrated by an analysis of passages bothfrom the last part of Proust’s ›Recherche‹ and from the context of ›Jean Santeuil‹ and ›Contre SainteBeuve‹). Yet by evaluating inspiration as something that could not do without intellectual work, Proust undermines anti-intellectualistic platonizing poetics. In addition, this implies that Proust declares the gap between artists and non-artists as unbridgeable. For Proust, inspiration is enchanting because it is time regained, but takes shape only in the process of poetic creation.

Subversion and inspiration are fundamental concepts in the poetics of Octavio Paz. Following the programs of creacionismo and surrealism they are part of a self-reflexive and emancipatoric poetological position of the author. They are used by him to produce figures of transpersonal speech (as in his essay ›El arco y la lira‹) and to underline the ambiguity of the poetic word (as in his poem ›Blanco‹).