Eurythmy Performance

We therefore see how the poet wants to make true in his own artistic and poetic endeavors what he says: “When the soul speaks, / alas, the soul no longer speaks.” This means that in speech, the soul becomes external in two ways—in terms of abstraction and in terms of usefulness. But the poetic artist brings speech, which on the one hand tends toward the abstract and on the other toward the useful, back into a kind of constantly dissolving and restoring balance in the imaginative and rhythmic-musical elements of language. He shapes language by gaining an imaginative view – at least approximately – of the inner essence of the nature of sound and also of the flow of speech in rhythm, meter, and melodious theme. For language is only artistic insofar as it is musical or – if one uses the word in a broader sense – plastic.