We now leave strict chronology behind, for Der Tor und der Tod antedates the major poems discussed above. There are probably as many ideas of Hofmannsthal's “decisive” turning point from lyric to drama as there are critics, but my position is that no such turning point exists, that the intertwining of problems in lyric and drama as forms is effective in all the early works. The form of drama, for Hofmannsthal, in the very process of relieving certain tensions inherent in the practice of lyric poetry (or in the process of developing those tensions, depending on how we look at it), is beset by an unresolvable tension of its own, since it must accomplish two different tasks that do not agree with each other. It must be the metaphysical action by which world is spoken into being, and it must also be a resolute turning away from the metaphysical toward the mimetic. On one hand, the language of lyric poetry, even in its self-enclosed non-referentiality, gives rise to a chain of thought by which the poet is required to accept his finite, self-consciously fragmented condition as the basis for his art, which means he must reconceive his work in terms of mimetic rather than logical or structural considerations. “Die Gestalt erledigt das Problem” (P4 144). On the other hand, drama is also required by the problem of speech and writing, the metaphysical necessity that in poetry the language become strictly action.