Richard Exner, in a study that attempts boldly to illuminate Hofmannsthal's whole career by interpreting one short text, feels called upon to say at the outset that he is “not pleading the case for invariability in Hofmannsthal's work. But a development is not the same as a break.” This is an important point, simple as it may be. There are frequent developmental crises in Hofmannsthal's career, and times when the poet himself has little idea where he is headed; but his life's work, in the end, is characterized by an extraordinary, if deeply problematic cohesion, which is mainly the result of his own effort to achieve it.

My approach, while not so radical as Exner's, is similar in its proceeding from the interpretation of a relatively small number of texts. I seek thus to present the reader with more or less complete arguments of limited scope, rather than oblige him to keep a large amount of preliminary material in mind while waiting for the conclusion that justifies it. And the reader does not have to agree with all my inferences from the particular to the general in order (I hope) to find something useful in the individual interpretations. In any case, I will not try to treat all of Hofmannsthal. Especially the narrative work will receive less than its share of attention, and I concede that this lack has to do with my conviction that Hofmannsthal's is a fundamentally theatrical imagination.