The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 63: Con-verse-ing with Stefan GeorgeThe best response to a poem you value will be a poem you write in reply. The superbly crafted lyrics of German poet Stefan George (1868-1923) embody a range of moods that not only charm the hearer by their verbal music but make the responder want to continue the melody and to elaborate or amplify suggested implications. George’s contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). offers context in my replies, as do kindred spirits from Russia.From “The Book of the Hanging Gardens” the George lyric “Voices of the River” initiates a series of dramatic monologues embodying expressive psychological portraits, and Nikolai Gumilyov’s “Drunken Dervish” provides a comparable study of dramatic ambivalence and lyric exuberance.From “A Year of the Soul” I select a melancholy meditation relating to the tradition of 19th century poet Heinrich Heine, who liked to give his own folksong-like laments a humorous twist comparable in ambivalence to the “merry dread” of George.From “Mournful Dances” I choose a mentality-portrait that brought to mind another troubled bard from the Romantic period, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.From “The Tapestry of Life” I offer a hymn-like journal entry by George that brings to mind a closely comparable religiously oriented prayer-like masterwork I translate from the German of Rilke, showing the abiding legacy of early Catholic spirituality in the two bards’ writing.To a poem “The Word” from the brief sequence “Song” I respond with a presentation of Tyutchev’s Russian lyric “Silence” in a discussion of the dramatic strengths and hazards of incorporating maxims or adages in lyrical monologues. While George says, “No thing is, where the word has failed,” Tyutchev writes, “The thought, once uttered, is a lie.” With deep gratitude,Martin