Those who had seen in the young Hofmannsthal one of the most promising lyric poets ever to have emerged in Austria looked at this shift in interest with misgivings. The German symbolist poet Stefan George, who had published many of Hofmannsthal's poems and verse plays in his esoteric journal
Blätter für die Kunst, for example, condemned Hofmannsthal's career after 1900 as a betrayal of that early promise, as a development which had led "vom Tempel der Kunst auf die Straße" (out of the temple of art into the street). Even Hermann Bahr, a friend who had been instrumental in propagating the young Hofmannsthal's fame, once remarked facetiously that he could not forgive Hofmannsthal for not having died at the age of twenty.
Thus Hofmannsthal's reputation rests primarily on his poetry, dramas, libretti, and essays. But he also made a significant contribution to modernism with such seminal works of fiction as"Das Märchen der 672. Nacht" (The Fairy Tale of the 672nd Night, 1905; translated as "Tale of the Merchant's Son and His Servants," 1969),"Reitergeschichte" (1905; translated as "Cavalry Patrol," 1939), and, to a lesser extent, "Erlebnis des Marschalls von Bassompierre" (1905; translated as"An Episode in the Life of the Marshal de Bassompierre," 1952), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919; translated as The Woman without a Shadow, 1957), and the fragmentary novel Andreas oder Die Vereinigten: Fragmente eines Romanes (1932; translated as Andreas; or, The United: Being Fragments of a Novel , 1936), written intermittently between 1907 and 1927.
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