With every new beginning, Hesse believed himself to be dealing with new problems and new figures. But on looking back in 1953 he realized that he had been concentrating all the time, from differing levels of experience, on "the few problems and types that are appropriate" to him. The demarcation of the poetic potential of his themes—though this seemed meagre to him then—is irrelevant, for at a later stage it enabled Hesse to look back on groups of individuals and to discern in them resemblances of character. He sees in them a multiform entity …, and thus he is confirmed in the belief not only that each individual needs to "awake" and be "reborn" but that this is the way in which the evolution of man will come about.
The recurrence and variation of problems and types to which Hesse himself refers does not result from any poverty of imagination. The metamorphoses of the basic theme are breathtaking. In each of its numerous settings in space and time the theme is equally convincing and meaningfully different. The journey through life which man must undertake becomes the object of the poet's "knowledge, presentiment, thought and feeling", it is captured in the colours and the landscapes of the painter's "Bilderhandschrift" ["pictorial writing"], and speaks to him from music. While the poet in Hesse can be intoxicated by the "magic of the visionary", the story-teller Hesse calls his narratives "monologues in which a single human being and his relations to the world and to his own self are being scanned". (pp. 253-54)
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