Herder and Klopstock (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1913 Excerpt: ... PART III A TREATMENT OF KLOPSTOCK'S AND HERDER'S POETIC LANGUAGE The great movement toward language-reform, introduced by Opitz in the seventeenth century and continued by Gottsched in the eighteenth, was purely intellectual in character. Its theories were based largely upon the works of Scaliger and Ronsard, and in its later phases upon Boileau; its chief aim was to develop the German language so as to make it conform to the rules set down by these critics. Language was treated rather from the standpoint of grammatical structure than of artistic perfection, and little or no regard was paid to those peculiar qualities of the German tongue which constitute its original strength and beauty. Shortly before the middle of the eighteenth century a new school of criticism arose in Switzerland under the leadership of Bodmer and Breitinger, who, together with Alexander Baumgarten, surveyed an entirely new path through the field of pure aesthetics. They attempted to analyze the nature of the beautiful, and gave recognition to the importance of the creative fancy in the production of artistic masterpieces. With all this, a new conception of language was born. The theory was established that the language of emotion and imagination differs in its very nature from that of reason and logic, and is entirely independent of arbitrary grammatical rule. Attempts were made, also, to ascertain what constitutes the aesthetic qualities of poetic language. In opposition to the teachings of the Gottsched School, the Swiss critics advocated the reintroduction of dialectic and archaic expressions; that is, the revival of those descriptive words and phrases, common in the old popular tongue, which had been eliminated from the literary language. By this theory the vernacular, the "Volks...