"With music it is different. Now we do not merge inner with outer, but enter directly into that which the soul experiences as the spiritual or psycho-spiritual; leave space entirely. Music is line-like, one-dimensional; is experienced one-dimensionally in the line of time. In music man experiences the world as his own. Now the soul does not assert something it needs upon descending into or leaving the physical; rather it experiences something which lives and vibrates here and now, on earth, in its own soul-spirit nature..."
"For true art is an expression of man's search for a relationship with the spiritual, whether the spiritual longed for when his soul leaves the body, or the spiritual which he desires to remember when he dips down into a body, or the spiritual to which he feels more related than to his natural surroundings, or the spiritual as manifested in colors when outside and inside lose their separateness and the soul moves through the cosmos, freely, swimming and hovering, as it were, experiencing its own cosmic life, existing everywhere; or (our last consideration) the spiritual as expressed in earth life, in the relationship between man's soul-spirit and the cosmic, in music..."
"It is here that art enters. It forms a bridge across the abyss. That is why art must realize that its task is to carry the spiritual-divine life into the earthly; to fashion the latter in such a way that its forms, colors, words, tones, act as a revelation of the world beyond. Whether art takes on an idealistic or realistic coloring is of no importance. What it needs is a relationship to the truly, not merely thought-out, spiritual. No artist could create in his medium if there were not alive in him impulses springing from the spiritual world. This fact points to the seriousness of art, standing alongside the seriousness of cognition and religious experience. It cannot be denied that our materialistically oriented civilization diverts us, in many ways, from the gravity of art. But any devoted study of true artistic creation reveals it as an earnest of man's struggle to harmonize the spiritual-divine with the physical-earthly..."
"What is primeval art? It is nothing other than speech itself (a fact little understood today). For our speech is fettered to the material-earthly; it no longer manifests what it was when human beings, feeling transported into the Zodiac, incorporated into themselves from zodiacal constellations the twelve consonants, and from the movements of the planets past the fixed-star constellations, the vowels. At that time human beings did not intend to express through speech what they experienced upon earth, but rather what the soul experienced when it felt transported into the cosmos; which is why, in ancient times, speech flowered into poetry. The last remnants of such poetry are contained in the Vedas and, more abstractly, in the Edda. These are after-images of what, in greater glory, in much greater sublimity and majesty, had arisen directly out of the formation of languages during those ages when human beings could still feel their own soul life intimately united with cosmic movement and experience..."
"Poetry would not be poetry — and in our time much poetry is no longer poetry — if certain aspects of man's communion with the cosmos had not been kept. What remains is whatever in speech-formation passes beyond the prose meanings of words into rhythm, rhyme and imagination. For true poetry never consists of what is stated literally. Into the prose content of a poem, whether written down or, better, recited or declaimed, there must sound rhythm, beat, imagination. This points to elements not contained in prose; to a background which, in every true poetic work, cannot be understood but must be guessed at, divined. It is only the prose content which can be understood by the mind. The fact that poetry conveys something lying outside its words, for which the words are but a means, the fact that poetry's aura of mood echoes cosmic harmony, melody, imagination, this fact, even today, makes poetry poetry..."
Rudolf Steiner 1923
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