Note 233 — Chapter II · RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY (continued 2)

In his “Art of the Future,” Gesammelte Schriften, III. 82 ff., he tells how dance, song, and poem were at first inseparable. Dance has as artistic material “the whole man from top to toe”; but it becomes an art only through rhythm, which is also the very skeleton of music: “without rhythm no dance, no song.” Rhythm is “the soul of dancing and the brain of music.” With the human voice comes poetry, all three being woven in one: out of this union of the three “is born the single art of lyric,” but they get their highest expression in the drama.