The Transience of the Aesthetic

I have been reading Charles Rosen's "Radical, Modern Hofmannsthal" from the April 8, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books . Hugo von Hofmannsthal was a Austrian poet who wrote, apparently, brilliant poems (I have not yet read any myself) from 1890-98 (when he was 16-24) before ceasing writing poetry (he also wrote the librettos for several Richard Strauss operas. Much of the article discusses why Hofmannsthal quit writing poetry. Apparently, Hofmannsthal gave an answer in a fictional let...