As every crystallization is dependent upon certain physical conditions, so every individualization of human nature depends upon the state of the historical epoch in which it occurs.  To represent these modifications of human nature in their relative necessity is the main task which poetry has to fulfill in contradistinction to history, and here it can, if it attains to pure form, render a supreme service.  But it is difficult to separate the merely incidental from the main task and then besides to avoid subjective moods; so that we scarcely have even the beginnings of such poems as now hover before my mind.

(1847)

To present the necessary, but in the form of the accidental:  that is the whole secret of dramatic style.

If the characters do not negate the moral idea, what does it matter that the piece affirms it?  The negation of the individual factors must be so very decided, precisely in order to give emphasis to the affirmation of the whole.

Human institutions require a man to be a man like other men; but man, whoever and whatever he may be, wishes to be an individual, indeed is, as such, individualized.  Hence the rupture.

Let the understanding question in a work of art, but do not let it answer.

(1848)

The understanding no more makes poetry than salt makes food, but it is necessary to poetry as salt is to food.

(1849)

One does not sit down to play on the piano in order to verify mathematical laws.  Just as little does one write poetry in order to demonstrate something.  Oh, if people would only learn to comprehend that!  Indeed the beauty of all the higher activity of man is precisely the fact, that ends which the individual never even thinks of are attained thereby.

(1853)

The process of dramatic individualization is perhaps best illustrated by comparison to water.  Everywhere water is water and man is man, but as the former acquires a mysterious flavor from every stratum of earth that it flows or trickles through, so man acquires a peculiarity from his time, his nation, history, and fate.

(1857) Man would perhaps still have as acute senses as animals, if thinking did not divert him from the outer world.

(1859)

Ideas are the same thing in the drama that counterpoint is in music; nothing in themselves but the primary condition for everything.

(1861)

(Concerning my Nibelungen.)

It seems to me that a purely human tragedy, natural in all its motifs, can be constructed upon the mythical foundation inseparable from this subject, and that so far as my powers permit I have constructed one.  The mysticism of the background should at most remind us that what we hear in this poem is not the seconds’ clock, which measures off the existence of gnats and ants, but the clock that marks the hours only.  Let the reader who is nevertheless disturbed by the