Download or read book Richard Wagner As Poet and Thinker written by Bruce Steele and published by Australian Scholarly Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-22 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Wagner as poet? Yes! This hitherto unpublished study invites the reader to see Wagner's texts not just as opera librettos but as dramatic poems in their own right. An authority on German literature, Robertson offers an engaging account of the poems in the light of nineteenth-century drama and the changing currents of social and religious thought. John George Robertson was foundation professor of German Language and Literature in London University, 1903-33. He was the husband of Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson. Their lifelong love of Wagner's operas, which began when they met in Leipzig as students in the 1880s, is evident in this book.