GEORGE, STEFAN. — Poet, born at Rüdesheim (Romania) on 12 July 1868, died in Switzerland, near Lausanne, on 4 December 1933. One of the last three eminent German poets, belonging to that triad which, in opposition to naturalism, reconnected itself, through nobility of spirit and purpose, with the great Germanic poetic tradition.
After making long journeys abroad and pursuing philological studies in Berlin and art-history studies in Munich, G. — who possessed innately a fundamental lyrical core, a religious feeling for art, and an aristocratic, austere, heroic way of life, abhorring the crowd as well as the mechanisms and materialism that annihilate the individual, together with an emphatic Nietzschean voluntarism — turned toward symbolism and the formula of art for art’s sake, which he propagated in Germany through the Blätter für die Kunst (1892–1919), but, increasingly and in a distinctive manner, toward the conception of the poet as priest, indeed as prophet. Although he remained to the end a devotee of formal beauty, there is undeniably, in his work, an evolution toward greater concreteness, both with regard to its object and to its spiritual content; he admitted, however, nothing other than the autonomous value of poetry, detached from psychological or historical factors. His religion of poetry is, naturally, a-Christian.
Editions: Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke (18 vols., Berlin 1927–34).