This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ... Poetry Wedded To Music No history of art of the present day makes any mention of poetry or music; the former now belongs to literature--the art of writing letters--the latter stands in a category by itself, neither fish nor flesh, its technique being too abstruse and difficult to awaken interest or be understood outside the narrow circle of professional musicians, and its influence too physical and general not to be regarded somewhat contemptuously by the learned as the art of the misera plebs and the superficial dilettanti. And yet we have but to open our eyes and look around us to see that poetry not only occupies in itself, as the philosophers assert, the " highest place" among all arts, but is the direct source of almost all creative activity and the creative focus even of those works of art which do not directly depend upon it. Moreover, every historical and every critical investigation will convince us, as they did Lessing, that poetry and music are not two arts, but rather " one and the same art." It is the poet wedded to music that ever awakens us to art; it is he who opens our eyes and ears; in him, more than in any other creator, reigns that commanding freedom which subordinates nature to its will, and as the freest of all artists he is unquestionably the foremost. All plastic art might be destroyed and yet poetry--the poet wedded to music--would remain untouched; the empire of music would not be an inch narrower, only here and there devoid of form. It is indeed an inexact expression when we say that poetry is the " first" among the arts: rather is it the only art. Poetry is the allembracing art which gives all other arts life, so that where the latter emancipate themselves, they needs must carry on an ars poetica on their own...