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Selective quotes from Robert Schumann, Herald of a "New Poetic Age" by John Daverio

For Schumann, one should " sacrifice surface beauty for the sake of dramatic truth and vivid representation" not to "shock a sensation-hungry public" which is shallowness.

Schumann thinks "True" melodic style will unite "profundity and facility, significance and grace." Schumann looked to musical profundity and eloquence, and not singabilitiy, as the critical features of a truly melodic style.

Like Schumann, Wagner too distinguished between the formulaic, tuneful conceits of the Italian and the eloquent musical idea of Germans. "One can recognize melodic significance in every note in the harmony, in deed, in every rhythmic pause in Beethoven's Symphonies."

Vision at 9 in the evening To Clara Wieck
An angel-child descended,
Now she sits at the piano, musing on old songs;
And when she touched the keys,
There appeared above,
Floating in a magic circle
Figuer upon figure
Image upon image:
The old Elfking
And gentle Mignon,
And defiant knights,
Their lustrous weapons poised,
And nuns on bended knee
Lost in pious devotion.
Those who heard her raved,
Praising her as if she were a renowned prima donna;
But dismayed and feather-light
She vanished into her homeland.


From a chapter of Flegeljahre by Jean Paul

A masked ball is perhaps the highest means through which life is able
to make a postlude to poetry's prelude. Just as all social stations and
historical epochs are equal before the poet, and all external trappings a
mere camouflage, but everything within is joy and resonance, so here
people poeticize themselves and their lives - the most ancient fashions
and customs are revived and take their place next to the most recent -
the remotest savage, the finest and the coarsest classes alike, the mock-
ing caricature, even different seasons and religions, the fiendish and
the friendly - all these are rounded into one loght and happy circle, and
the circle is splendidly set into motion, as if through a metrical power,
namely through music, that land of spirits, just like fancy-dress outfits
are the land of bodies.

(How sad that we as human beings can only feel comfortable to experience this in a masked ball!)

"Every genius is at once a creative and self-formed [gebildetes] individual, ... [though] not every creative individual is a genius."

Schumann concludes that "tones are higher words,' ... "Music is poetry raised to a higher power; spirits speak the language of poetry, but the angels communicate in tones."

Schumann shows a greater willingness to subject his own views to a critique in another essay, "Das leben des Dicthers." Here Schumann begins by painting an idealized portrait of the literary life, "The poet lives a charmed life; his eye becomes dark and weak during the bustling day, but it awakens clear and serene in the solitude of Nature." At the same time, he acknowledges that this stance is at best naive, and at worse false, that the discrepancy between ideal vision and quotidian reality is the precise cause of the poet's pain.

...creative adolescent's quest for self-definition: "I myself don't clearly know what I actually am; I believe that I possess imagination, and no one denies it, but I'm not a deep thinker: I can't proceed logically with the threads I've perhaps entwined too tightly. Whether I am a poet-for onecna't become a poet - is for posterity to decide. Further about myself I can't say, for the most difficult thing is to describe oneself, and 'know thyself' is a powerful phrase."