SOURCE: Waller, Christopher. “The Criticisms.” In Expressionist Poetry and Its Critics, pp. 10-23. London: Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Waller comments on criticism leveled against Expressionist writers by five contemporary critics: R. M. Rilke, Thomas Mann, Georg Lukács, Stefan George (through Friedrich Gundolf), and Robert Musil.

Literary criticism ought to be a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them.¹

This book takes as its starting-point, and will use as a framework, a series of criticisms of Expressionism by contemporary writers, who have something pertinent and incisive to say about the movement. There are two principal bands of criticism, the formal and the thematic. Rilke and George, who focus their attention on formal considerations, regard Expressionism as a cult of formlessness, whereas Lukács and Thomas Mann argue that Expressionism claims a vital...