Ethos and Politics in the Poetry of Stefan George

Abstract

With reference to poems published by Stefan George between 1890 and 1917, the paper argues that George’s lyrical work embodies the ethos of the conversio, the spiritual-intellectual turn from the world of phenomena toward the intelligible world, and the amor ascendens, the beginning, the dynamic center, and the goal of the conversio. Stefan George distinguishes between poetry that experiences the ground of being, and therefore can symbolize the fullness of being, and poetry that, unable to sound the depths of being, produces, not symbols that participate in being, but only “signs” that are unconnected to it, and therefore ephemeral. The poetry that plumbs the depth of being is in George’s view capable of saving the meaning of friendship and love and of embodying it in poems. The poetry that achieves this high office becomes the ethos around which a new community of concrete friendships can be formed. In this way the ethos of poetry reaches into politics. This is the subject of Der Stern des Bundes (1914). The ethos of the amor ascendens is the dynamic critical yardstick for measuring the spiritual health of society. George’s political criticism of utilitarian society that has lost sight of the higher values becomes thematic in Der Siebente Ring (1907) and is the basis of his criticism of World War I in “Der Krieg” (1917). The paper closes with a short note on the importance of Stefan George’s poetry to Eric Voegelin.