Word: poetic
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...endeavour to combine the beauties of all literature in one produced heterogeneousness in form and matter. It was a mistake to transplant the poetic life of the middle ages into the present, and instead of giving a poetic hue to our modern life, to make poetry the focus of all human activity. A modern liter ature which deals exclusively in mediaeval ideas may be popular for a time as a curiosify, but it can not satisfy the taste of a modern nation for a long time...
...Romantic movement, however, produced a lasting effect in the powerful impulse which it gave to the study of mediaeval literatures. Many of the poetic treasurers of the middle ages which had been buried for centuries were now brought to light and the side of the Romantic tendency in literature then arose to a parallel tendency in philology, most conspicuously represented in its early beginnings by the two Grimm brothers, the founders of the new science of Germanic philology...
...court epics are of a different nature, being similar to the short English verse of seven or eight feet. Of this class the principal writers are Hartmann, Gottfried von Strasbourg and Wolfram Eschenbach. Hartmann, the author of "Erick," a poem of several thousand lines, was a writer of great poetic genius, as was Got fried, who, although unable to read or write, has left a poem of 1900 lines. But after the death of these three men there was a great decline in literature...
...rapid expansion, and of unscrupulous accumulation. Out of such experiences the great epic traditions of a nation were born. These epics are not left intact. The Germans in the midst of this period adopted the Christian religion, and abandoned their own religious ideas; with the religious ideas went the poetic ideas, too. But the Icelanders preserved the old traditions better, and Professor Francke analyzed the Elder Edda, and showed how it is a reflex of the time of migration...
...sole piece of verse in this number is entitled "Leap Year." The point is bright and well turned but is couched unfortunately in lines hardly poetic except in form...