It is through declamation and recitation that the art of poetry is accorded its true value. So I shall allow myself – not, however, out of allegiance to any abstract principle or any wish to claim that a world-view which springs from the needs of our time must cast its reforming light in some way or other over everything – I shall allow myself on quite other grounds to say a little about recitation and declamation from the vantage-point of the life- and world-conception represented at this Congress. We shall only recapture an inner, a genuine soul-understanding of poetry when we are in a position to find our way to the real homeland of poetic art. And this real homeland of poetic art is in fact the spiritual world – though it is not that intellectual, that conceptual or ideational factor in the spiritual world particularly cultivated in our own time. For this more than anything else has a paralysing effect on poetry.

We shall see most clearly what is meant by this when we are reminded that one of the most significant products of this art resounds to us out of the revolutions of time along with a particular avowal on the part of its creator, or perhaps creators. The Homeric epics invariably begin with the words “Sing, O Muse...” Nowadays we are only too inclined to treat such a phrase as more or less a cliché. But when it was first coined it was no cliché – it was an inner experience of the soul: whoever it was that conceived the poem out of the spirit, whence this phrase was also drawn, knew how he was immersed through his poetic faculty in a region of human existence and experience different to that in which we stand in immediate // sense-perception, or when our power of intellect takes hold conceptually of sense-impressions. The poet knew that his inner being was seized by an objective spiritual force. That human consciousness has indeed undergone a change in this respect in the course of evolution has, I would say, been documented historically.

When Klopstock, drawing upon the German spiritual life, wished to sing of the great deed of the Messiah, as Homer had sung the past events of Hellas, he did not say “Sing, O Muse...”, but “Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man’s redemption.” Here something of greater intensity is indicated, something connected directly with the human and its self-reliance. Here man has come to himself in his individual personality.

Yet we can add: if the mode of consciousness which lives in our modern world of ideas and observations were the sole criterion, we should lose poetry and art altogether. All the same, it is necessary that here, too, what was suitable for mankind at one time should now assume other forms. But these new forms can only arise if the way into the spiritual world is rediscovered; for such a path alone makes it possible for the human “I” to be laid hold of again by the spiritual world – not as in former times, in an unconscious, dreamy fashion, but in accordance with the needs of the present day: in full consciousness. That this need not be bound up with a crippling of imaginative activity – this is not generally recognized today. It will come to be understood, however, as the world and life-conception put forward here gains more and more ground. If we enter into the spiritual world with circumspection – in full consciousness and with a developed feeling of personality – it will exert no crippling effect on our direct perception or on the vital participation in things and beings so necessary to poetry and art in general. If, however, we abstract ourselves from things in ideas, standing aside from them in purely intellectual concepts, our knowledge will yield nothing that can become a direct artistic creation. But if we plunge down into what pervades the world as a vibrant spiritual essence we will find again, along this spiritual path what poetry and art as a whole were fundamentally seeking all along.

From such a spiritual approach the poet will have before his soul what recitation and declamation must re-create for his audience. The poet must submerge himself in the element of speech. This experience of submersion was still to be found among the Greeks, and even in earlier forms of Central European spiritual life, such as the Germanic. In primaeval ages of humanity, if one wished to receive the divine-spiritual and bring it to expression as it spoke in the soul, one dived down not only into the element of speech, but also into what flowed within speech, like the waves of the sea – into the breath. And in earlier times, when the ancient spiritual life was still valued above science, art or religion in isolation, in the period when that spiritual life came into being, poetry, too, was not isolated. It grew isolated at the stage when the felt vitality of the breath (as manifestation of the efficacy of man’s innermost will) was taken up into more exalted regions of organic life: into the element of speech.

In due course today we have arrived at the element of thought. And from the thought-element we can experience only a sort of “upthrust” of the breath. What held sway in ancient times in Central Europe in the form of an unconscious feeling whenever man felt the poetic urge was the pulsating of the blood. Taking hold with the will, this formed the breathstream from within, into tone; whereas when the man of Greek or Graeco-Roman times waxed poetic he lived more in what flowed from the breathing-rhythm in the way of a picture or conception, and in what musically formed the sound, tone and line through metre, number and syllable.

Goethe’s whole being, his essential soul-nature, was born from the spirit of Central Europe. The writings of his youth derived their imaginative, pictorial form from an experience, an instinctive feeling of how human breathing pushes up, through the will-pulsating waves of the blood, into the formation of tone and sound – and so into the expressivity of the human soul. In this way he attained the qualities we admire so much in his youth, even when he appears to be speaking in prose. We have the prose-poems of Goethe’s youth, like the marvellous Hymn to Nature, where the ruling principle is that where we feel the language permeated by a kind of breathing which pulsates on the waves of the blood. It was from some such sense that the young Goethe initially composed his Iphigeneia. In this composition we feel how something from the Nibelungenlied, or the Gudrunlied, still lives and weaves in the prose, welling up and working in its high and low intonations. It calls attention to the upward thrust of the will into what comes to be man’s head-experience. This rhythm, thrown upward into configurations of thought, is what we can admire in the poems of Goethe’s youth, including the first version of his Iphigeneia.

But Goethe longed to get away to Italy. A time came when he could no longer come to terms with himself without undertaking a journey to Italy, which he did in the ’eighties. What was it that he longed for in his innermost being at that time? He longed to enter more deeply into human individuality – to enter into the whole human being with what lived in the high and low tones, creating in speech-formation an effect like the forms of a Gothic cathedral. He wanted to blend this with the even-measured flow he was seeking and believed was accessible only in the south, in Italy, in the wake of what had lived in Greek culture. Out of this, stemming from his feeling for such art as was still to be seen, came an understanding of Greek art He understood that the Greeks created their art in accordance with the same laws that govern the productions of nature; and of this he believed himself to have uncovered the clue. He believed, too, that he had traced these laws in speech-formation. He brought speech into a deeper connection with the breath. Then, in Rome, he refashioned his Iphigeneia accordingly. We must distinguish sharply between the northern Iphigeneia as first conceived and what came about when he refashioned it in Rome – even though the difference between the original and the Roman verse-Iphigeneia is really quite slight. It turned it into a poem that no longer lives simply in high and low tones; it became a work where in quite a different way – and not in any trivial sense, but as regards the whole of its speech-formation - the psychical experience of the blood-rhythm, the circulation with its deeper rhythm, plays over into the tranquil metre of the breathing-rhythm and the element of thought. In this way, what represented a declamatory form in the Nordic Iphigeneia is transformed in the Roman version into recitation.

By juxtaposing the one Iphigeneia with the other in this way, we can clearly discern the difference between declamation and recitation. Recitation leads us more deeply into human nature, and creates, too, more from its depths, seizing upon the whole blood-circulation as well as the breathing. But because in declamation the will (as it surges in the depths) is caught up into the highest part of man’s spiritual and soul-being, into the breath, it appears to us as the more forceful – living as it does in high and low tones. It does not only engage the flow of rhyme and verse, but evokes something which goes out into the world – perhaps even with a certain belligerence – as alliteration. In this there is a beauty that is peculiar to the north.

We do not wish today to give theoretical explanations, but to make known what should be present in an artistic sensibility. We will therefore firstly present the declamatory, in Goethe’s Nordic Iphigeneia; and then contrastingly the recitative, in the Roman composition. [Note 25]

[The magnificent language of the Authorized Version puts it on a different level to any other translation in English. There can be no doubt of its own high literary qualities, and it furnishes us with fine examples of poetry for declamation, as in this version of the ninetieth Psalm:

Lord, thou hast bene our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountaines were brought forth,

or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world:

even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.

Thou turnest man to destruction: and sayest,

Returne yee children of men.

For a thousand yeeres in thy sight

are but as yesterday when it is past:

and as a watch in the night.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood, they are as a sleepe:

in the morning they are like grasse which groweth up.

In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up:

in the evening it is cut downe, and withereth.

For we are consumed by thine anger:

and by thy wrath are we troubled.

Thou hast set our iniquities before thee:

our secret sinnes in the light of thy countenance.

For all our dayes are passed away in thy wrath:

we spend our yeeres as a tale that is told.

The dayes of our yeeres are three-score yeeres and ten,

and if by reason of strength they be fourescore yeeres,

yet is their strength labour and sorrow:

for it is soone cut off, and we flie away.

Who knoweth the power of thine anger?

even according to thy feare, so is thy wrath.

So teach us to number our daies: that wee may

apply our hearts unto wisedome.

Returne (O LORD) how long?

and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.

O satisfie us early with thy mercie:

that we may rejoyce, and be glad all our dayes.

Make us glad according to the dayes wherein thou hast afflicted us:

and the yeeres wherein we have seene evil.

Let thy worke appeare unto thy servants:

and thy glory unto their children.

And let the beautie of the LORD our God be upon us,

and establish thou the worke of our hands upon us:

yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

Metrical translations of the Psalms are numerous; but many of them have no aims beyond fitting the verses to a tune. The version begun by Sir Philip Sidney and completed by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, however, brought all the literary resources of the classical tradition in Renaissance poetry to bear on the problem of making an authentically poetic translation. The result is that the ninetieth Psalm is here drastically transformed into a recitative vein:

DOMINE REFUGIUM

Thou’our refuge, thou our dwelling,

O Lord, hast byn from time to time:

Long er Mountaines, proudly swelling,

Above the lowly dales did clime:

Long er the Earth, embowl’d by thee,

Bare the forme it now doth beare:

Yea, thou art God for ever, free

From all touch of age and yeare.

O, but man by thee created,

As he at first of earth arose,

When thy word his end hath dated,

In equall state to earth he goes.

Thou saist, and saying makst it soe:

Be noe more, O Adams heyre;

From whence ye came, dispatch to goe,

Dust againe, as dust you were.

Graunt a thousand yeares be spared

To mortall men of life and light:

What is that to thee compared?

One day, one quarter of a night.

When death upon them storm-like falls,

Like unto a dreame they grow:

Which goes and comes as fancy calls,

Nought in substance all in show.

As the hearb that early groweth,

Which leaved greene and flowred faire

Ev’ning change with ruine moweth,

And laies to roast in withering aire:

Soe in thy wrath we fade away,

With thy fury overthrowne

When thou in sight our faultes dost lay,

Looking on our synns unknown.

Therefore in thy angry fuming,

Our life of daies his measure spends:

All our yeares in death consuming,

Right like a sound that, sounded, ends.

Our daies of life make seaventy yeares,

Eighty, if one stronger be:

Whose cropp is laboures, dollors, feares,

Then away in poast we flee.

Yet who notes thy angry power

As he should feare, soe fearing thee?

Make us count each vitall hower

Make thou us wise, we wise shall be.

Turne Lord: shall these things thus goe still?

Lett thy servantes peace obtaine:

Us with thy joyfull bounty fill,

Endlesse joyes in us shall raigne.

Glad us now, as erst we greeved:

Send yeares of good for yeares of ill:

When thy hand hath us releeved,

Show us and ours thy glory still.

Both them and us, not one exempt,

With thy beauty beautify:

Supply with aid what we attempt,

Our attempts with aid supply.

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621).]

Goethe followed up his incursion into the new poetic sphere of his remodelled Iphigeneia with works like his “Achilleis”, from which a passage will now be recited. Here in Goethe we find something that shows us how poetry springs from the whole man, how it should emerge from the whole man and take shape as recitation and declamation.

I might seem, at first glance, to be propounding a mechanical interpretation of reciting and declaiming, if I were to point to something in the nature of man as the origin of recitation and declamation: this something is to be found, however, precisely along the spiritual path.

As an art, poetry has the task of enlarging again what prose has atomized and contracted into the single word. The harmony of sounds, the melodious flow of sound in the picture-formation of speech, of mundane speech, is in this way “canopied over,” as we might say, by a second, spiritual speech. The prose-speaker clothes in words those thoughts he wants to convey, along with whatever of individual experience he can. The poet draws back from such rhetoric, to a much more profoundly inward human experience. [Note 26] He reverts to a level at which (as I have already indicated) the rhythms of breathing and the circulatory system become perceptible, as they vibrate through the language of poetry. We shall only get to the bottom of rhyme, metre, the pictorial and the melodic in speech, by comprehending human nature spiritually, even down to the physical. We have, then, as one pole of the rhythmical in man, the breathing; and as the other pole, circulation. In the interaction of breathing and circulation is expressed something which is first given, in its simplest ratio, when we attend to the resonance of breathing and circulation in the flow of human speech. In breathing, we draw a particular number of breaths every minute – between sixteen and eighteen. And over the same period we have, an average, about four times as many pulse‑beats. Circulation and breathing interact, so that the circulation plays into the breath, and the breath in turn weaves into the circulation its slower rhythm. It is an apprehension of such an harmonious interchange between pulse-beat and breathing that echoes on in speech. Formed and transformed in various ways, it produces the after-effect of a pictorial or a musical speech-formation, which is then brought to expression by the poet.

I said – and the point has actually been raised – that the fundamental law of poetry, the interaction of breathing and circulation that I have elicited from human morphology might be considered mechanical and materialistic. But the spiritual life that holds sway and works in the world can only be grasped if we trace that life right into its material formations; only if the life of man’s spirit and soul is pursued to those depths where it lives out its expression in corporeal functions. These bodily workings will then act as a firm wall to hurl back, like an echo, what derives from the laws of a profounder spirituality – a spirituality of direct experience pouring itself out into speech.

Goethe sensed how in earlier stages of human culture man stood in a deeper relation, as it were, to his own nature. He too sought to enter into an earlier epoch’s feeling for poetic forms and revivify them. It is actually of deep significance that at the highest point in the development of German poetry, Goethe pointed away from the crude, prosaic stress popularly taken for recitation and declamation, to a special kind of what can be called – and deservingly – a real speech-formation. To rehearse the iambics of his Iphigeneia, Goethe stood in front of the actors with his baton. He knew that what had to be revealed was, above all, the imagery he wanted to incorporate, while the prose-content was there merely as a ladder by which to scale the heights of the full, spiritual sense – the sound and the picture-quality of speech that must evolve from it. We must pierce through the given prose-content of a poem into the truly poetic. Schiller’s experience in his best creations, of an initially indefinable melody, a musicality onto which he then threaded the prose-content, was not a personal peculiarity. As regards the words, some of Schiller’s poems could even have had a different content to the one they currently possess. In a true poet there is everywhere, in the background of the rhetorical speech, a quality that must simply be felt. And only when it does justice to the musical in speech-formation will true poetry stand revealed.

If we turn to what is often taught today as recitation and declamation, it is with a keen sense of something having, in these uncultured times, gone amiss. The voice itself is strengthened, and great value is attached to technical adjustment of the organism: this is because no-one is any longer able to live in a direct relationship with recitation and declamation (not to mention singing), and we transfer to material tampering with the body what should be experienced on a quite different plane. The important thing in teaching recitation and declamation is that the pupil should on no account be made to do anything but live with speech-formation as such and the soul-resonance of living with speech-formation, in such a way as to bring him to listen properly. For anyone who is capable of listening correctly to what may come over in poetry, the appropriate breathing, proper disposition of the body, etc., will come about of their own accord – as a response to proper listening. It is important to let the pupil live in the actual element of declamation and recitation, and leave all the rest to him. He must become absorbed in the objective realities of tone, in “musical pictoriality” and in authentically poetic formations. In this way alone, paradoxical as it may sound, can we get the pupil to develop an ear for what he hears declaimed to him and thereby sensitivity to what moves spiritually over the waves of sound he hears. Only when he experiences something in his surroundings, we might say, and not in himself – and even though to begin with this experience is illusory, it must be cultivated – only then will he be able to refer back to himself what he feels vibrant in the world around him. It is only through the recital of certain aesthetically fashioned word-sequences, which have a special relation to human morphology, that we ought to learn breath-control or anything else connected with the adjusting of the voice. In this way we shall best meet the requirements of Goethe’s artistic perception and the sensitivity we value so greatly.

By way of illustration – not of any theory, but of the foregoing remarks there will now be recited a passage from Goethe’s “Achilleis”. [Note 27]

[Since the hexameter in its true, classical form can only occasionally be reproduced successfully in English, C. Day Lewis performed the service of devising a metre which sounds convincingly like it. He used it to evoke the heroic and epic associations of classical poetry in relating, for example, an episode from the Spanish Civil War in “The Nabara”. This extract is from “Phase One”:

Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage

Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer’s mad

Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made

In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage

But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.

Mortal she is, yet rising always refreshed from her ashes:

She is bound to earth, yet she flies as high as a passage bird

To home wherever man’s heart with seasonal warmth is stirred:

Innocent is her touch as the dawn’s, but still it unleashes

The ravisher shades of envy. Freedom is more than a word.

I see man’s heart two-edged, keen both for death and creation.

As a sculptor rejoices, stabbing and mutilating the stone

Into a shapelier life, and the two joys make one –

So man is wrought in his hour of agony and elation

To efface the flesh to reveal the crying need of his bone.

Burning the issue was beyond their mild forecasting

For those I tell of – men used to the tolerable joy and hurt

Of simple lives: they coveted never an epic part;

But history’s hand was upon them and hewed an everlasting

Image of freedom out of their rude and stubborn heart.

C. Day Lewis (1904-1972)

An earlier solution to the problem was a rather more radical departure from the hexameter for a five-foot line, and the blank-verse pentameter remains the natural epic metre in English. Milton employed it in recreating many of the features of classical epic in Paradise Lost, as may be illustrated from the following passage (Book VI, 189-214):

So saying, a noble stroke he lifted high,

Which hung not, but so swift with tempest fell

On the proud Crest of Satan, that no sight,

Nor motion of swift thought, less could his Shield

Such ruin intercept: ten paces huge

He back recoild; the tenth on bended knee

His massie Spear upstayd; as if on Earth

Winds under ground or waters forcing way

Sidelong, had push’t a Mountain from his seat

Half sunk with all his Pines. Amazement seiz’d

The Rebel Thrones, but greater rage to see

Thus foil’d their mightiest, ours joy find, and shout,

Presage of Victorie and fierce desire

Of Battel: whereat Michaël bid sound

Th’ Arch-angel trumpet; through the vast of Heav’n

It sounded, and the faithful Armies rung

Hosanna to the Highest: nor stood at gaze

The adverse Legions, nor less hideous join’d

The horrid shock: now storming furie rose,

And clamor such as heard in Heav’n till now

Was never, Arms on Armour clashing bray’d

Horrible discord, and the madding Wheeles

Of brazen Chariots rag’d; dire was the noise

Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss

Of fiery Darts in flaming vollies flew,

And flying vaulted either Host with fire.

John Milton.]

And now, to illustrate declamation, Goethe’s “Hymnus an die Natur” (abridged, as occasion demanded, for a Eurythmy performance).

Natur! Wir sind von ihr umgeben und umschlungen –

unvermögend aus ihr herauszutreten, und unvermögend,

tiefer in sie hinein zu kommen. Ungebeten und ungewarnt

nimmt sie uns in den Kreislauf ihres Tanzes auf

und treibt sich mit uns fort, bis wir ermüdet sind

und ihrem Arm entfallen.

Sie schafft ewig neue Gestalten; alles ist neu, und

doch immer das Alte. Sie baut immer und zerstört

immer.

Sie lebt in lauter Kindern; und die Mutter, wo ist

sie? – Sie ist die einzige Künstlerin; sie spielt ein

Schauspiel; es ist ein ewiges Leben, Werden und

Bewegen in ihr. Sie verwandelt sich ewig, und ist

kein Moment Stillestehen in ihr.

Ihr Tritt ist gemessen, ihre Ausnahmen selten, ihre

Gesetze unwandelbar. Gedacht hat sie und sinnt beständig.

Die Menschen sind alle in ihr, und sie in allen.

Auch das Unnatürlichste ist Natur, auch die plumpste

Philisterei hat etwas von ihrem Genie.

Sie liebt sich selber; sie freut sich an der Illusion.

Ihre Kinder sind ohne Zahl.

Sie spritzt ihre Geschöpfe aus dem Nichts hervor.

Leben ist ihre schönste Erfindung, und der Tod – ihr

Kunstgriff, viel Leben zu haben.

Sie hüllt den Menschen in Dumpfheit ein und spornt

ihn ewig zum Lichte. Man gehorcht ihren Gesetzen,

auch wenn man ihnen widerstrebt; man wirkt mit ihr,

auch wenn man gegen sie wirken will.

Sie macht alles, was sie gibt, zur Wohltat.

Sie hat keine Sprache noch Rede, aber sie schafft

Zungen und Herzen, durch die sie fühlt und spricht.

Ihre Krone ist die Liebe.

Sie macht Klüfte zwischen allen Wesen, und alles will

sie verschlingen. Sie hat alles isoliert, um alles

zusammenzuziehen.

Sie ist alles. Sie belohnt sich selbst und bestraft

sich selbst, erfreut und quält sich selbst. Vergangenheit

und Zukunft kennt sie nicht. Gegenwart ist ihr Ewigkeit.

Sie ist gütig, sie ist weise und still.

Sie ist ganz, und doch immer unvollendet.

Jedem erscheint sie in einer eignen Gestalt. Sie

verbirgt sich in tausend Namen und ist immer dieselbe.

Sie hat mich hereingestellt, sie wird mich auch

herausführen. Ich vertraue mich ihr. Alles hat

sie gesprochen. Alles ist ihre Schuld, alles ist

ihr Verdienst!

 [Perhaps the nearest parallel in English is the unrestricted and freely expansive rhythm of Blake. He celebrates not Nature, but the spirits (the Sons of Los) in Nature in these extracts from his Milton pl. 27,66 – 28,12; pl. 31, 4 – 22:

Thou seest the Constellations in the deep & wondrous Night:

They rise in order and continue their immortal courses

Upon the mountains & in vales with harp & heavenly song,

With flute & clarion, with cups & measures fill’d with foaming wine.

Glitt’ring the streams reflect the Vision of beatitude,

And the calm Ocean joys beneath & smooths his awful waves:

These are the Sons of Los, & these the Labourers of the Vintage.

Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer

Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance

Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave: