47. Eurythmy Performance

One can say that precisely by striving for this, one achieves a stronger artistic effect than through the spoken language when this spoken language becomes the expression of poetry. In our civilized languages, poetry, in terms of its artistic element, already suffers from the fact that, to a large extent, a conventional element flows into our languages, that which only serves for social communication from person to person. Of course, the poet must use all of this, but it is an unartistic element of language formation, and it becomes particularly unartistic to the extent that the thought element, the element of ideas, mixes with the linguistic element. In the linguistic element, the thought element and the will element, which both reveal themselves from the human soul, flow together. But now one can say: something is all the more artistic the more the thought element recedes. The more we are able to empathize with an object or process in such a way that we do so to the exclusion of the ideal, to the exclusion of the abstract, to the exclusion of the thought element, the more the impression is an artistic one, which is particularly achieved in eurythmy by the fact that the thought element is completely excluded and only the will impulses that otherwise accompany the thought element are transferred into the movements of the limbs.