The study by Carl Gustav Jochmann (1789-1830) entitled Die Rückschritte der Poesie (The regressions of Poetry) had more or less fallen into oblivion when Walter Benjamin rediscovered it and decided to republish it. For Jochmann the golden age of poetry is the primitive one, in which learning has not yet been divided into different specialized branches and the poet preserves and expresses the whole sum of knowledge necessary to people. The impossibility or difficulty of handing on written texts, means that poetry is the most rational form of communication, so that it is experienced not as some type of diversion or entertainment (as it has become in the modern age), but as the most important occupation of all. The advance of civilization means that the functions fulfilled by poetry are steadily taken over by other disciplines: historiography makes the epic poem superfluous; and tragedy is no longer a public cultic event for the citizenry and becomes a pastime for people's free hours.
Jochmann sees this process not only as inevitable but also as positive, because it means a more rational distribution of our faculties and a development of our awareness and of our own capacities. The only space left open to poetry in the age of prose is that in which it does not compete with knowledge but is limited to expressing the poet's subjectivity in other words, lyric poetry.
Paolo D'Angelo's study first gives the background to Jochmann's "rediscovery" and describes the broad lines of The regressions of poetry; it then goes on to examine the parallels which german interpreters have often tried to draw between Jochmann's ideas and those of Giambattista Vico, pointing out the widespread presence of primitivistic theories of poetry throughout the eighteenth century, and highlighting particularly the influence the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder had on Jochmann. The theory of the exhaustion of the function of poetry in the modern civilization is then described, comparing it with its contemporary theory of the "end of art" as elaborated by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics. Lastly, the interesting possibilities of Jochmann's final hyphothesis are noted, according to which poetry can exist in the modern world only as lyric poetry. Possible antecedents for and comparisons with this idea are also given, seeing it as one episode in the more generalized movement from the idea of poetry as imitative art to that of poetry as expressive art.