Eurythmy Performance

It is precisely the right art of recitation and declamation that reveals the true essence of poetry. For only those who can say with the poet, with complete inner understanding, “When the soul speaks, / alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks,” can find the essence of poetry. When the soul comes to our lips, into our words, which have long since lost their connection with the essence of the world, then we have prose, then we no longer have poetry. We only find poetry again when we return to the way in which, I would say in large and small waves, in oscillating waves and in angular waves, the sounds and words move in the verse, in the stanza, how the imagination flows through the iambus or the trochee or the like; when we gain the image, the imagination, or when we gain, as the real poet seeks, through meter, rhythm, through the melodic theme, to strike music out of language. Then we have arrived at what lies beyond the words, what is artistically shaped in the words, whereas today, in recitation and declamation, one often seeks mere prose punctuation, even if, as I said, a reaction is already taking place.