ABSTRACT
Isn’t it almost as if Heym had to prove to himself in September 1911 that for once he could write a poem undarkened by demons and death? This time he works out—gently, gently—a verse equivalent of those French impressionist paintings and other color experiments which, according to his diary, so fascinated him. Thus the delicacy of “Revery in Light Blue” contrasts with the brutal doom poems for which Heym is better known and which, by slapping the face of liberal optimists, gave the panache of “radical” to the first German expressionists of 1911–13 and the panache of “reactionary” to George’s Star of the Covenant, also mostly composed during 1911–13. “Revery” is without the doom and the polemics of expressionist diction, its expressionism is rather, as will be seen, that of “blue” painting; in diction it is still symbolist; add to that its French impressionism, and one sees the folly of pigeonholing a poet under any exclusive classification. Symbolism and expressionism are the pigeonholes usually applied to George and Heym respectively, as if both weren’t both. The transplanter cravenly dodges the trap of trying to define either -ism; the real trouble is that they are neither useless jargon nor useful generalization but partly useless, partly useful. So why not sometimes use them, even while sometimes repudiating them?
