41. Eurythmy Performance

For today one has a special preference, I would say for a kind of prosaic recitation, which one wants to shape into beautiful recitation, whereby one particularly emphasizes the inner literal meaning when reciting. This is not the actual artistic element, this prosaic quality of the content. The actual artistic element of the poetry is precisely the inner, intense movement that is depicted outwardly for the eye in eurythmy. But then the accompanying recitation in eurythmy must also particularly emphasize this element of the rhythmic. That this is justified in relation to poetry can be seen from the fact that, for example, a real poet like Schiller — today, of course, 99% of what poets write is not really poetry, as we shall see later. - a real poet like Schiller did not first have the literal content in his soul when his poems were created, but he had a kind of melodious experience in his soul, and the literal content only arose from it. Just because people today believe that they are being very artistic – although in truth this is not very much represented in our education of the mind today – the truly artistic feeling for poetry does not rest on the content of a poem, but on the rhythmic, on the formal, on what is behind it. Goethe rehearsed his Iphigenia with a baton, in the same way as an orchestra is rehearsed, although it was a play and not poetry.