not upon the "poetic" or
"unpoetic" nature of the subject itself, depends the poetic
significance.

With this new conception, however, new dangers are connected. Near at
hand lies the fear of a too open declaration of the most intimate
feelings. In many old-style poets of modern times, in Hoelderlin, in
Kleist, Grillparzer, and Annette von Droste-Huelshoff this fear assumes
the character of ethical aversion to baring their feelings in public.
But near, too, lies the hunt after interesting experiences--the need
to "experience something" at any price--which marred the life of a
romantic poet of Brentano's talents, and also affected the conduct of
the realist Grabbe. A new responsibility was placed upon the shoulders
of the German poet, which rested heavily on men like Otto Ludwig, and
on account of which writers like Hebbel or Richard Wagner thought
themselves justified in claiming the royal privileges of the favorites
of the gods.

An entirely new method of poetic study began, which perhaps originated
with Heinrich von Kleist: a passionate endeavor to place the whole of
life at the service of observation or to spend it in the study of
technique. The consequence was not seldom a nervous derangement of the
whole apparatus of the soul, just at the moment when it should have
been ready for its greatest performances, as in the case of Nikolaus
Lenau; however, it also frequently resulted in an endlessly increased
receptivity for every experience, as in the case of Bettina von Arnim,
Heine, or Annette von Droste, and the most recent writers.

The infinitely difficult task of the modern poet is made still harder
by the fact that, in spite of all his efforts, he, happily, seldom
succeeds in transforming himself into, one would like to say, an
artistically working apparatus, such as Ibsen very nearly became; not,
however, without deploring the fact at the close of his life. The
German poet in particular has too strong a lyrical inheritance not to
reecho the impressions _directly_ received by his heart. The struggle
between the demands of a purely artistic presentation of reality,
i. e., one governed exclusively by esthetic rules, and its sympathetic
rendering, constitutes the poetic tragedy of most of our "naturalistic
writers," and especially of the most important one among them, Gerhart
Hauptmann. But from this general ideal of the poet, who only through
his own experience will give to reality a true existence and the
possib