This, now, leads up to another question, to that concerning poetic ideals, and not only poetry in itself; the poet also becomes the object of interest and expectation.  Every age embodies a different ideal, by which in all instances the already existing type and the loftier hopes of youth are welded into one—­if we maybe allowed so to express it.  Antiquity asked that the poet should fill the heart with gladness; the Middle Ages desired edification with a spiritual or a worldly coloring; the first centuries of modern times applied to him for instruction.  This last ideal was still in vogue at the beginning of modern German literature.  But gradually the conception of “instruction” altered.  The poet of the Germanic nations had now to be one who could interpret the heart.  He should no longer be the medium for conveying those matters which the didactic novel and the edifying lyric had treated—­things valuable where knowledge of the world and human nature, intercourse and felicity are concerned—­but he must become a seer again, an announcer of mysterious wisdom.  “Whatever, unknown or unminded by others, wanders by night through the labyrinth of the heart”—­that he must transmit to the hearer; he must allow the listener to share with him the gift of “being able to give expression to his suffering.”  Thus the chief task of the modern poet became “the reproduction of the objective world through the subjective,” consequently “experience.”  Real events, objects, manifestations must pass through a human soul in order to gain poetic significance, and upon the significance of the receiving soul, not upon the “poetic” or “unpoetic” nature of the subject itself, depends the poetic significance.

With this new conception, however, new dangers are connected.  Near at hand lies the fear of a too open declaration of the most intimate feelings.  In many old-style poets of modern times, in Hoelderlin, in Kleist, Grillparzer, and Annette von Droste-Huelshoff this fear assumes the character of ethical aversion to baring their feelings in public.  But near, too, lies the hunt after interesting experiences—­the need to “experience something” at any price—­which marred the life of a romantic poet of Brentano’s talents, and also affected the conduct of the realist Grabbe.  A new responsibility was placed upon the shoulders of the German poet, which rested heavily on men like Otto Ludwig, and on account of which writers like Hebbel or Richard Wagner thought themselves justified in claiming the royal privileges of the favorites of the gods.

An entirely new method of poetic study began, which perhaps originated with Heinrich von Kleist:  a passionate endeavor to place the whole of life at the service of observation or to spend it in the study of technique.  The consequence was not seldom a nervous derangement of the whole apparatus of the soul, just at the moment when it should have been ready for its greatest performances, as in the case of Nikolaus Lenau; however, it also frequently resulted in an endlessly increased receptivity for every experience, as in the case of Bettina von Arnim, Heine, or Annette von Droste, and the most recent writers.