Eurythmy Performance

When we are dealing with the artistic design of language, we see the poet struggling to overcome, as far as possible, the thought that lies in language when it is prose. In rhetoric, in speech that strives to flow in beautiful language, the aim is already to shape the language itself; and the poet attempts to overcome the purely prosaic thought through the musical element inherent in language, or through the plastic-pictorial element inherent in language, and to express what is to be expressed in the shaping of language itself. Therefore, the task of a true art of recitation or declamation, which is not fully cultivated in our unartistic age, will be to reshape the word in a musical and plastic-pictorial way. For what, for example, is to be suggested in poetry as being moved by passion in the soul is expressed by a different rhythm in the sequence of words than what seeks to express grief or introspection of the soul and the like.