59. Eurythmy Performance

The truly poetic is that which one experiences in one's soul either with the character of the musical, or with the character of the plastic-pictorial. When thought intrudes – as it always does in art – when thought intrudes, the rhythm, the meter, the form that is to be expressed in poetry becomes overgrown with thought. And then a piece of poetry will no longer have an effect through the purely artistic from the outset. As paradoxical as it sounds, ladies and gentlemen, it must be said that the essential artistic quality of a piece of poetry can actually be felt, felt quite artistically, when it is presented in a language that one does not understand literally, that one does not even master. Because the artistic element is not found in the literal content. Of course, you need it in the literal content to have a kind of ladder to climb up in a poetic way.