(_Bildungs-Poesie_) of that time. It was necessary once again to
compare our technique, our relationship between the poet and the
people, our participation in all the various literary _genres_ and
problems, with the corresponding phenomena in the countries of Zola,
Björnson, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Strindberg.

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