“Wir halten es für einen vorteil,” observes the first issue (1892) of George's journal Blätter für die Kunst, “dass wir nicht mit lehrsätzen beginnen sondern mit werken die unser wollen behellen und an denen man später die regeln ableite” (Einleitungen 7). The advantage has been imperfectly maintained. The tenets concerning poetry and art that George himself set forth — even in this same introduction, implying a precept in the act of disclaiming such a thing — have become as well known as most of his verse. But George's published poems (including his translations) occupy more than 1,000 pages in the two-volume Werke, while the maxims on poetry he chose to reprint in book form occupy all of a page and a half (1: 530–31). To preserve more of them, he wrote in the foreword to the second edition of Tage und Taten (1925), his selected prose writings, “würde [. . .] eine ungebührende beladung sein für dieses im wesentlichen dichterische werk” (1: 473). The first principle of his poetics is the reticence of art.

In deference to that design, this essay will take up George's thinking about poetics — his view of the poetic calling, of the nature of poetry, and of his own poetic practice — chiefly as his own poems on the topic formulate and explore it. Poems occupied with such concerns appeared in almost every one of his books. In keeping with this intent, the aim will be to approach these poems as expressive forms rather than, as sometimes has been done, as paraphrasable content only. Several of them number among George's most familiar works, but they still have much to offer and appear here alongside others, perhaps less well known and still to be enjoyed.

The first unmistakably poetological poem George published, “Die Spange” (The Clasp), appears deliberately placed at the close of his second book of poems, Pilgerfahrten (1891), and is as richly suggestive a poem about poetry as anything George wrote: