ABSTRACT
Stefan George, a Nietzschean despiser of mass-men, mechanization, and modernity, was a Rhineland-rooted admirer of French and Hellenic culture. George broadened the limits of German diction in two ways: by creating a new poetry that was sometimes as musical as Italian and sometimes as monosyllabic and rugged as English. Yet his is the marvelous achievement of almost single-handedly restoring authenticity, austerity, and the dignity of form to German poetry at a time when it fell between the two evils of a slack epigone-romanticism and an arid unimaginative naturalism. The younger poet, Georg Heym, was always circling around the older one (George); it was an oscillating orbit because Heym simultaneously imitated George to the point of near-plagiarism and detested him, a classic instance of a love-hate relationship to one's literary father. Both poets incarnate the moment of transition from French-influenced "symbolism" to revolutionary German "expressionism," although George is usually classified only as a symbolist and Heym only as an expressionist.
