Just over a century ago, the 28-year old Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal published a curious letter, dated August 22, 1602, and purporting to be from Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon. In this curious epistle, the Elizabethan aristocrat explains to his learned friend why he has abandoned his literary ambitions and indeed, language itself. The “letter,” titled simply “Ein Brief” in German, coincides with Hofmannsthal’s own renunciation of the lyric poetry, which had made him a celebrity in the tinseled world of fin-desiecle Vienna. It has been taken, reasonably enough, as his own explanation for his drastic turn away from poetry and toward the worlds of the theater, opera, and prose; in America he is remembered mainly as the librettist of Richard Strauss’s “Electra” and “Der Rosenkavalier,” among many other operatic works.

As a teenager Hofmannsthal had been a lyric prodigy. His early poems, published under the pseudonym Loris when he was barely 16, gained him sudden fame and the unstinting admiration of such older poets as Stefan George. Lionized by Viennese cafe society, “Loris” could only meet his admirers if chaperoned by his father, who had a healthy mistrust of poets. Hofmannsthal poems, which remain among the greatest lyrics in the German language, have an ageless quality, as if written outside time. He himself believed that his poetry emerged from a state of “pre-existence,” a kind of Platonic anamnesis, rather than from his own precocious insights. His lyrics, seemingly impervious to translation, display an almost magical identification with their subjects, whether with an emperor, a ship’s cook, the spring wind, or a tree laden with raindrops.

Hofmannsthal’s poems, at first glance, betray the sensibility and trappings of the aesthete. But beneath their polished suavity a revulsion is at work; a revulsion against not only estheticism but against language itself, and this gives the poems their force. As he expressed it in the final stanza of an untitled poem:

Many destinies are woven beside mine.
Existence interlaces them all,
And my own share is more than this life’s
Slim lyre or slender flame.

The “slender flame” (“schlanke Flamme”) may be a sly rebuke to Stefan George, who had hymned his beloved Maximin, a sylph-like teenager whom George idolized, in a poem that begins, “You pure and slender as a flame” (“Du schlank und rein als eine Flamme”). For George had fallen in love with Hofmannsthal and strove to conscript him as the ultimate ephebe for his “circle.” Hofmannsthal resisted stubbornly; with the help of his father, he broke with George, who banned all mention of him forever after among his acolytes. Later Hofmannsthal would remark of the older poet, “He leaves out too much.” Indeed, it might be said now, with a century’s hindsight, that George, whatever his technical merits as a poet, leaves out life itself.

“A Letter” elaborates Hofmannsthal’s repudiation of lyric poetry, but the thrust of the work is not so clear, to me at least, as it is sometimes made to seem. It is now available, in a fresh version, together with a number of Hofmannsthal’s early short stories and prose fragments, in “The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings” (New York Review Books, 128 pages, $14), translated by Joel Rotenberg and with a superb introduction by the Irish novelist John Banville. (An earlier translation appeared in 1952, in the wonderful three volume selection of Hofmannsthal’s writings published by Princeton University Press in its Bollingen Series, but this is now out of print and hard to find.)

The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch, a fervent admirer of Hofmannsthal, argued that the letter marked the poet’s shift from “word mysticism” to “word-skepticism.” Others have seen in it a reflection of the fragmentation of sensibility characteristic of Modernism, a prophetic expression of the dissociation of words and things in our time. In the letter, Lord Chandos describes a severe, almost pathological severance between words and their meanings. It isn’t aphasia, for he can still manage all his daily transactions; it is, rather, a dislocation of words and their designated objects. As he puts it, “First I gradually lost the ability, when discussing relatively elevated or general topics, to utter words normally used by everyone with unhesitating fluency. I felt an inexplicable uneasiness in even pronouncing the words ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘body’ … the abstract words which the tongue must enlist as a matter of course in order to bring out an opinion disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms.”

As his impairment worsens, objects begin to replace words in his consciousness. Ordinary objects in particular supplant language itself: “A watering can, a harrow left in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse – any of these can become the vessel of my revelation.” His tendency toward a wordless empathy with mute objects reaches its apogee in a terrifying passage. He has ordered rat poison to be spread in his cellars and afterwards, while riding in the fields, he is invaded by a vision of the rats, driven to a frenzy in their final agonies, as though he were among them, were one of them.

Suddenly this cellar unrolled inside me, filled with the death throes of the pack of rats. It was all there. The cool and musty cellar air, full of the sharp, sweetish smell of the poison, and the shrilling of the death cries echoing against mildewed walls. Those convulsed clumps of powerlessness, those desperations colliding with one another in confusion. The frantic search for ways out…

This brings to his mind a passage in Livy about the destruction of Alba Longa and then a recollection of the razing of Carthage, as though the algebra of the imagination knew no point of final rest but kept computing an involuntary infinitude of associations.

This extraordinary work seems to me to be less about the fragmentations of Modernity than about the dangerous adhesiveness of the lyrical imagination, which melds with whatever it touches and sucks out all significance like a starfish eviscerating a clam. Chandos despairs over his abandoned literary projects, but at the same time he knows intense rapture; it is an incommunicable ecstasy articulated in the dumb objects around him, as if in an indecipherable vernacular. And it is the ultimate annihilation of poetry, which always depends, as Hofmannsthal would put it later, on “the breath of human feeling.”

After 1902, Hofmannsthal turned to the theater, helping to create the Salzburg Festival and, after 1906, collaborating with Richard Strauss. (As Edward Sackville-West remarked of their collaboration, as detailed in their correspondence: “We seem to be watching a Siamese cat working out a modus vivendi with a Labrador.”) On July 15, 1929, two days after his son’s suicide, Hofmannsthal suffered a stroke while preparing for the funeral and was rendered speechless. The silence he had wrestled with for so long in his marvelous plays, fiction, libretti, and essays reclaimed him at the last.