Ladies and Gentlemen
IT IS, perhaps, not a matter of indifference to those who listen to an address to know the inner circumstances and the feelings of the speaker standing before his audience: a word of personal acknowledgement may have precedence here over all factual discourse and account. Let me begin, therefore, with the statement that this is a precious and great, a festive and stirring hour for me. To speak here, not as a stranger or outsider, but, to a degree, in an official capacity, as a member of the staff of the Library of Congress; that is a great honor, a great joy for me: it holds the charm of the improbable and adventurous; a charm to which, as you know, artists and poets have at all times been particularly susceptible. They would not be what they are, if their view of the play of life was a sober, phlegmatic view, and not, rather, a marvelling and animated, deeply entertained, a festive view, which knows, just through the medium of art, how to turn life into spiritually sublimated entertainment, and into a festival for others as well.
It is a good and fortunate coincidence that the topic on which I want to speak—or, am to speak—is, in itself, a festive topic, not only because all art as such has, or should have, festive character, but because a literary work is to be discussed whose very object is the idea and the nature of the festival: more than that—it is, for its own part, a sort of festive celebration, an observance and visualization, a solemn action which playingly neutralizes time and depicts the past and the future, the tunelessly existing, the myth, is the present.
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