STEFAN GEORGE, ST. — Poet, b. at Rüdesheim (Rhineland) on 12 July 1868, d. in Switzerland near Lausanne on 4 Dec. 1933. One of the last three outstanding German poets, forming a triad which, in opposition to Naturalism, reaffirmed the noble spirit and aims of the great German poetic tradition.
After extensive travels abroad and philological studies in Berlin and art history in Munich, G. — who bore within him a native lyrical core, a religious sense of art, and an aristocratic, austere, heroic style of life, shunning the crowd as well as mechanism and materialism which annihilate the individual, with an added resentful Nietzschean voluntarism — turned toward Symbolism and the “art for art’s sake” formula, of which he became a propagator in Germany through *Blätter für die Kunst* (1892–1919), but progressively toward the conception of the poet as priest, indeed as seer. While remaining until the end a cultivator of formal beauty, his output shows an undeniable evolution toward greater concreteness, both in subject matter and spiritual content; yet he admitted no value beyond the autonomous worth of poetry, severed from psychological or historical factors. His religion of poetry was, naturally, un-Christian.
Editions: *Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke* (18 vols., Berlin 1927–34).