ABSTRACT

Poems by Stefan George mentioned in this chapter: "The Anti-Christ", "Templars", ["To Ida Coblenz"], "Homecoming", "A Last Letter", "The Talking Head", The "Heliogabalus" Poem, "Thin Ice", "Credo", "The Cursing", "The Perpetrator", "Guardianship", "Seaside". The poem "To Ida Coblenz" was set to music for voice and piano by Schonberg. George uses only feminine rhymes and varies his pentameters with tetrameters. He wrote "Homecoming" poem for Coblenz after returning from travels. "A Last Letter", prose poem has never been translated into English, as even the Morwitz "complete" translations omitted the book Days and Deeds. George never admitted that this letter was not only an objective work of art, but was a subjective cri de coeur to Ida Coblenz. He showed his ultimate emphasis on the purely aesthetic by deliberately picking this epiphany of sheer form and sheer melody (written-much earlier-to a German who committed suicide with his lover-fight for Germany in World War I) as the final poem of his final book.