LXXIII. JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
1744-1803. Herder’s was the first strong voice to be raised in protest against the inveterate illusion of his countrymen that excellence in poetry depended on the imitation of good models. He took a deep interest in the poetry of primitive and unlettered men, and deduced from that his criteria of excellence; namely, sincerity, naturalness, strength and fulness of expression. The virtue of the greatest poets, such as Homer, Shakspere and Ossian, lay—so he said—in the fulness and fidelity with which they had felt and expressed the life of their nation and their epoch. Thus he became the founder of historical criticism and the harbinger of the coming romantic movement. It was he, more than any one else, who ushered in the ‘storm and stress’ era, with its watchwords of nature, power, genius, originality, and its general spirit of protest against all conventional restrictions.
- 1 From ‘Fragments on Recent German Literature’1: Poetry as mother tongue of mankind.
- 2 From ‘Critical Forests’2: Power, not sequence of tones, the essence of poetry.
- 3 From ‘Correspondence concerning Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples’3: The poetic superiority of ‘wild’ folk.
- 4 From an essay entitled ‘Shakespear’4: Sophocles and Shakspere.
- 5 From ‘Auch eine Philosophie’: The Middle Ages and the Age of Reason.5
