_Poetry_.--Poetry too represents the ideal in individual creations. Its aim, like the other arts, is the revelation of the Ideas. The poet must understand how to draw the abstract and universal out of the concrete and individual, by the manner in which he combines them. The universality of every concept must be narrowed more and more, until we reach the concrete image, for the poet must express the universal in concrete form. The whole of nature can be represented in the medium of poetry. The extent of its province is boundless. Thoughts and emotions, however, are its peculiar province, and here no other art can compete with it. That which has significance in itself, and not in its relations, the real unfolding of the Idea, is found definitely and distinctly in poetry. More genuine inner truth is to be found in poetry than in history. The poet's knowledge is intuitive, and by its means he shows us in the mirror of his mind the Idea, pure and distinct, bringing to the consciousness of others that which they feel and do. In the epic, the poem of romance, and the tragedy, selected characters are placed in those circumstances in which all their special qualities unfold themselves, and the depths of the human heart are revealed, and become visible in significant actions.
Tragedy is the summit of poetic art. Here the unspeakable pain, the wail of humanity, the triumph of evil, the mastery of chance is unfolded before us. It is one and the same will that appears throughout. Knowledge reaches the point at which it is no longer deceived by the veil of Mâyâ, the web of illusion. Thus the noblest men, after long conflict and suffering, at last renounce for ever the ends they have so eagerly pursued. { 75} The heroes and heroines of tragedy die, purified by suffering, after the will to live is dead. The true import of tragedy is that the hero expiates, not his own individual sins, but the crime of existence itself. Tragedy, then, presents the highest grade of the objectification of the will, in conflict with itself, on a scale of grandeur and awful impressiveness. The greatest poetry is symbolic in this deepest sense.
Goethe may be considered one of the greatest symbolists among poets. Every event in life was symbolic for him. It expressed something more universal, more extensive, more profound. The concrete image, the whole full-blooded individual was always clearly before his mind, but beyond that he saw and realised something more universal, from which it necessarily and inevitably springs. He saw that the truth of nature does not lie on the surface, but in a deeper unity, which the penetrative insight of the artist alone can grasp.