A painting, Weisse says, is already a frozen image of a temporal action. It is a shame that Weisse did not yet live in a time of comics, which would have provided him with a clear mediating type of art, which shows a series of such frozen images and thus creates an appearance of a temporal succession or narrative. As it is, Weisse just immediately moves from painting to poetry, which is for him a return to a temporal art, just like music was, but on a more developed level: while music, at least in its purest form, only presents us pure motions, poetry can describe also events of an everyday life, and indeed, everything in nature and history. Furthermore, Weisse continues, the temporal poetry appears also in a spatial, stable shape, when it is not just spoken, but also written down.
Like all art, Weisse says, poetry involves giving shape to an external material. In poetry, this material is language, whether spoken or written. Language is dealt in poetry like notes in music - it is not the individual words or notes that matter, but their proportions and rule-bound connections to one another. Indeed, Weisse notes, like music, poetry use metre and rhythm to give a quantitative structure to its material. In addition to this quantitative regularity, poems are qualitatively structured through the use of assonance or similarity of sounds, especially notifiable in rhyming. Rhythm and rhyming share the same goal of making language more regulated in its external appearance. A third component, Weisse suggests, affects the inner meaning of language by freeing it from the shackles of strict conceptual divisions - this is the use of metaphors.
The simplest shape of poetry, Weisse insists, is the simple narration of some temporal event, different from a mere description of a static situation. This narration is the providence of an epic. Because of its simple nature, Weisse explains, epic also has the simplest rhythm. Furthermore, epic is objective in the sense that what the poem says is determined not by the author’s frame of mind but by the external events narrated. Thus, there are e.g. no rules how many characters an epic can contain: as many as the story requires. Although determined by the object narrated, epic also has a creative person or an author behind it. Yet, the subject of the narrator is not of interest in epic, Weisse insists, being completely impartial (Weisse has obviously not thought about the possibility of an unreliable narrator).
What then an epic should narrate? Weisse thinks that it shouldn’t be something presently happening nor something that is just about to come, but something that has happened in a past that has already finished (clearly, Weisse is thinking of e.g. Homer describing the Trojan war that had happened a long time before Homer’s own lifetime). This past event is then presented in the epic as being generated by the interaction of clearly delineated characters or heroes with each other and with their indistinct background, ruled by the iron fist of necessity. What is important for the epic in this interaction is not the actual events, paradoxically, but the characters expressing themselves through these actions.
Weisse is clearly describing especially ancient epics - and of course, the ancient epic or Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. He does admit that epics are determined by the historical background of their author, just because the author of an epic has to describe the events as fitting in with what their cultural background supposes as laws of what the world is like. More specifically, Weiss groups ancient and romantic epics together, because both presuppose some mythology as their foundation. Modern epic, on the other hand, Weisse regards as having replaced mythology with human history and philosophical discussions. Modern epic poetry is then divided into many different genres, according to the various types of events narrated, but brought together under the name of a novel.
In epic, narration tries to be as invisible as possible and not be something distinct from the ideal to be narrated. Still, Weisse admits, narration is always something different from the ideal narrated. When this difference is understood, it creates a feeling of discrepancy between the two: the narrator either remembers a past ideal or longs for a future ideal. This subjective feeling of remembrance and longing is expressly exemplified, Weisse says, by lyric poetry.
Unlike epic poetry, which was meant to just simply narrate things and thus did not afford a very large degree of variation for narrative styles, lyrical poetry is meant to just describe the emotional status of a particular individual and thus has many possible styles, depending on what is meant to be told, Weisse explains. Similarly, he continues, different cultures have all their own forms of lyrical poetry. In broad brush strokes, ancient lyrical poetry is especially affiliated with the backward looking remembrance of the past, while romantic poetry has as its basic principle the longing of the poet to a future ideal. The third major type of lyrical poetry - that corresponding to the modern ideal - works then as a mediator between past and future.
In lyrics, the author concentrates on themselves and their own emotions and ignores the objective events narrated in the epic. The next move should then be, Weisse notes, a return to the narration of something objective. Yet, what is narrated has been changed, he continues. In epic poetry, the author described actions of divine and heroic persons. After the turn to subjectivity in lyrics, the author should know that art helps to bridge the gap between the ordinary and the divine life. It is then not anymore divine and heroic actions that are narrated, but events of a more historical type: this happens in the dramatic poetry.
Whatever the event narrated in a dramatic form of art, this event must at first seem quite opposed to an ideal beauty, Weisse notes. This opposition can be expressed in a dramatic form as a tragic fate, where ideal beauty is crushed by the cold hand of actual historical events. Then again, Weisse says, it can be dealt with in a comical fashion, by showing the eventual limitedness and ridiculousness of historical events and a subsequent revelation of ideal as what is stable and permanent in human life. While these two elements can appear in isolation, in tragedies and comedies, they can also be mixed in other types of drama.
Just like epic and lyrical poetry, dramatic poetry is also affected by the culture, Weisse notes. Here ancient drama plays a subservient role for Weisse: ancient tragedies are retellings of tales from mythological ideals, while ancient comedies, on the contrary, provide mythologically inspired caricatures of the ridiculous features of human life. The mythological background shackles ancient drama with external restrictions, like the chorus or unities of place and time. In romantic and especially modern culture, on the other hand, dramatic art removes these shackles of mythology and enables a variety of different types of drama combining tragic and comic elements and thus showing that ideal beauty and human life are separate, but still connected.
Drama is the highest form of art for Weisse. Yet, it is not the highest shape of beauty, he adds, because even drama as such still lacks life. This need for a living humanity is prefigured in the need to use actors to present the drama to an audience. Acting, Weisse says, is then similar to an art, but not identifiable as an independent art form, because it does not create anything stable (one wonders what Weisse would have thought of movies). Acting is then more of an accessory to drama - an attempt to reach something art cannot.
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