Note 1091 — Chapter VII · THE EARLIEST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF POETRY

It would be useless to attempt a bibliography of this subject. A. W. Schlegel’s historical account of the drama and its relations to epic and lyric is still useful. See especially Vorles., I. 124; II. 317, 321, 325. Eugen Wolff’s return to the priority of epic,—Prolegomena, etc., p. 10; “Vorstudien zur Poetik,” Zst. f. vgl. Litt., VI. 425,—fails to satisfy the student of ethnological evidence; like most writers from the æsthetic point of view, Wolff neglects to study the poetry of the throng, the choral, the dance. Barring this same fault, there is considerable truth in the view of Burdach (letter to Scherer, in the latter’s Poetik, pp. 296 f.), that epic and drama are wrongly taken as extreme antithesis in poetry, whereas lyric and drama are really “die beiden Urphänomene.” Little profit for the historical student of poetry is to be found in essays like Veit Valentin’s “Poetische Gattungen,” in Zst. f. vgl. Litt., N. F., V. 35 ff.