What is perhaps most striking about Hugo von Hofmannsthal are contradictions that characterize his creative imagination. His poetic laboratory was filled with an ever-increasing multiplicity of images, themes, ideas, situations, and dramatis personae. In changing disguises and in new contexts they constitute a large repertoire of works in progress, some of which, often after long delays, came to fruition. Much more of his material, however, never developed beyond the stage of arrested inventiveness and was forced into shapes and patterns that defied the poet's quest for grace and civility. Hofmannsthal's plays, especially, either move along with an altogether irresistible ease and an unobtrusively natural momentum, every inflection of their dialogue perfectly coordinated, every character a convincing embodiment of his or her dramatic function, every scene a full realization of its inherent conflict; or they strike even the casual reader as laborious and stilted--as the futile products of a...