12. Modern Poetry I

M. E. delle Grazie

I

Today, anyone who talks about modern trends in literature runs the risk of being ridiculed. How many immature, dilettante things are described as modern today! Critics, who often have no idea of what the human spirit has already produced in the course of its development, describe as modern many things which, to the discerning, are merely a modification of something that has long been there. I do not wish to be lumped together with these critics when I say that a radical change is taking place in our time, in artistic creation no less than in scientific conviction. This turnaround has not only recently become apparent. Goethe's youthful poetry was already characterized by it. His "Prometheus" is filled with the spirit that I would describe as modern. But Goethe, despite his depth, despite the universality of his spirit, was not energetic enough to carry out the building for which he had laid the foundation stone. His age does not correspond well with his youth. Nowhere do we find the fulfillment of what he promised us. Let us hold together the proud verses of Prometheus:

Here I sit, forming men
In my own image,
A race that is like me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy and to rejoice,
And not to respect you,
Like me!

with the humble ones in the second part of "Faust":

He who always strives,
We can redeem him.
And if love has even
Participated from above,
The blessed multitude meets him
With a hearty welcome.

The "free spirit", which finds the support of life in itself, has become a spirit of devotion, which expects the salvation of existence from divine grace. This describes the two poles of Goethe's creative work. The transformation took place slowly and gradually. If Goethe had remained in the position of his youth, we would not have "Iphigenia" or "Tasso", but we would perhaps have poems that we can now only expect from the future. Perhaps Goethe's works would not have been as artistically perfect as "Iphigenia" and "Tasso" if he had developed in a straight line from "Prometheus". But they would have been the first great products of a new era. Fate willed otherwise. Goethe abandoned the tendencies of his youth. He did not become the messiah of a new age. But he did bring us the most beautiful, the most mature fulfillment of a now dead epoch. His later poems are mature, overripe, but they are the last products of a series of developments. It is just as well. The time was not yet ripe for problems that we, a hundred years later, can barely guess at in vague outlines. Anyone who has a full awareness of these problems that are about to be born in the bosom of the present, who knows that we live in an age of expectation and have no right to dwell on the past, is what I call a modern spirit. I have never found this characteristic of genuinely modern striving, which dawned in Byron, so succinctly, so clearly outlined in any contemporary as in the Austrian poet M. E. delle Grazie. I have not formed this opinion from her first writings: "Gedichte", "Die Zigeunerin", "Hermann", "Saul"¹, but from her poems which have recently appeared in various magazines. These poems are the strictly lawful reflection of the modern world view from a deep, strongly feeling, clear-sighted soul endowed with great artistic creative power. What a comfortable and proud nature has to suffer from this view is expressed by delle Grazie in her poems. What a noble spirit feels when it sees the collapse of the old, great ideals, when it has to perceive how the modern conception of nature lets these ideals evaporate into nothingness and emptiness as insubstantial bubbles and vaporous formations, that is what we hear from the creations of this poetess. We are confronted with a mood of the present and hopelessness for the future. Only those who close their minds to the spirit that pervades our time, or who are shallow enough to laugh in the face of the bleakness, can fail to recognize the deep meaning of delle Grazie's poetry. There is nothing petty in the painful tones we hear here. Delle Grazie's sufferings do not spring from fate, which reigns over the everyday; they are rooted in the disharmonies of the cosmos and the historical development of mankind. They stand out from a significant background. That is why we do not find despondency and pusillanimity anywhere in them, but proud, bold elevation above pain. The dirty, the lowly, the common are shown ruthlessly in their nothingness, but the artist always proudly raises her head in order to be free of the despised, which she strikes with her scourge. Delle Grazie has seen through the deep irony that lies in human existence. She thinks nothing of knowledge, of ideals. These are things to which humanity aspires, only to feel all the more thoroughly disappointed when they turn out to be worthless and insubstantial appearances. But a proud spirit lives in the poet. She is able to raise herself to the height where one can smile at the nothingness of existence because one has ceased to have any desire for it.

I am looking for the reason for the mood in delle Grazie's latest collection of poems: "Italian Vignettes". There is a point in Rome's development where human greatness clashed most closely with human nothingness. Caesaric power was paired with human weakness, artistic height with ethical rottenness. The mouth that commanded nations greedily craved the kiss of the most wretched woman; a master's mind became a slave's mind when the embraces of high-ranking prostitutes subdued it. These "vignettes" reveal how this is still petrified in the remnants of old times, but how it can be interpreted by the clairvoyant eye:²

Divine dignity and divine rights
You have boldly arrogated to yourselves,
Spirit and virtue became servants,
Where the arbitrariness splashed great.

sings delle Grazie of the Roman Caesars. The mood that took hold of her in the eternal city is reflected in the words:

With elegiac whispers
Looks from the barren Palatine
A single pine tree gloomily
Towards the silent forum.

In addition to these stanzas, which are filled with a truly historical spirit, there is also no lack of those that vividly conjure up Italy's present before our souls. Here, delle Grazie captures the tone of melancholy just as well as that of cheerful humor, when it is in the nature of things. A number of poems have sprung from the impressions that Tasso's traces left in the poet's mind:

At your tomb all vain imaginings die,
Here your glory sits enthroned in majestic peace,
But where man suffered, I found tears,
And I was allowed to sob and dream here like you!

Under the title "Images and Figures", delle Grazie shares with us her feelings at the sight of great Italian works of art, such as Guercino's Sant' Agnese, Maderna's St. Cecilia, Belvedere's Apollo, Otricoli's Zeus and Michelangelo's Moses. - I have to admire the depth of the impressions in these poems as well as the spirituality of their rendering. Naples, Pompeii, Sorrento, Capri are sung about in deeply felt poems of great beauty of form. I was particularly moved by the one entitled "Two Madmen" from the cycle "Sorrento". Tasso and Nietzsche, who both walked on this soil, are juxtaposed:

Two great men walked these paths
And often both stand suddenly before my mind:
Tasso, the prince of poets by the grace of God,
And Friedrich Nietzsche ... equal was their
profit, And folly was his name ...

Both spirits had one thing in common: a drive lived in their breasts that strove unbridled into the depths of existence; both forgot that man is bound to the earth and that he must stop breathing when he rises above a certain height. Like the body, the human spirit is also dependent on the medium into which its life is once born. Tasso and Nietzsche, however, wanted to take their standpoint outside this medium in order to look down from the heights of heaven to the earthly. But in doing so, they consumed themselves.

Delle Grazie has seen all the glory that can be seen in Italy:

Like all of them, you drew me to you,
Enchanted, enraptured and beguiled,
On ruins you lied to me of a happiness,
That you destroyed hard in the sun's glare -

But she only found her worldview confirmed in one great example:

But I am not resentful ..., I am going home again,
Even if with a crudely broken walking stick -
I bring back with him the old torments
And here as there I lay him on a grave!