Private Kunst

By employing intrinsic analyses of literary texts by early modern authors such as Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and other authors, the present study shows that privacy as an aesthetic phenomenon is one of the central paradigms in the definition and interpretation of ›hermetic‹ literature from around 1900. The authors examined are testing private, artistic language forms by using textual strategies and rhetorical techniques to encode textual semantics and, through their linguistic complexity, are no longer accessible to most recipients. By shutting certain readers off, modern poetry stages itself as an exclusive and sacred medium for a few initiates and evolves into private art.