SOURCE: “Poetry and Politics: An Aspect of Schiller's Diction,” in German Life and Letters, Vol. 18, No. 2, January 1965, pp. 101-10.

In the following essay, Wells claims that Schiller deliberately employs poetical language and a declamatory style in his plays when dealing with facts he considers prosaic, and particularly when he presents legal and political details.

When Schiller was writing Wallenstein he was consciously trying to avoid both the declamatory style of his Don Carlos and also the dullness which he felt was inherent in a subject full of political detail and intrigue. He was trying to steer clear of ‘beide Abwege, das Prosaische und das Rhetorische’ (to Goethe, October 2nd, 1797). By rhetoric he means, among other things, a certain diffuseness—what E. T. A. Hoffmann called ‘eine gewisse Schwatzhaftigkeit, eine gewisse Prägnanz, in der jede einzelne Strophe immer die zehn folgenden zu gebären scheint’. Hoffmann wrote this...