Abstract

Peter Szondi concludes his 1963 essay “Lyric and Lyric Drama in Hofmannsthal's Early Work” on a curious note.¹ Following a brief but provocative analysis of the ways in which Hofmannsthal's poetry departs from the aestheticism of his early dramatic works, Szondi suggests a model for understanding the poem that remains a mere proposal in the absence of any explanation: “If, in the ‘Conversation [about Poems],’ the poem is like the wind that brushes over the fields [Wiesen], then Hofmannsthal's verses on the spring wind are at once, and without warning to anyone but the initiated, a poem about the poem…