[...] Once you are again permitted to concern yourself with literature, I should like you to send me word whether I might from time to time be allowed to send you books. I am sure you would find Feuerbach’s writings uncommonly stimulating reading. I would also introduce you to a poet whom I have recently recognized to be the greatest of all poets; it is the Persian poet “Hafiz”, whose poems now exist in a most enjoyable German adaptation by Daumer. Familiarity with this poet has filled me with a very real sense of terror: we with our pompous European intellectual culture must stand abashed in the presence of this product of the Orient, with its self-assured and sublime tranquillity of mind. I expect you would share my astonishment. The only merit of more recent developments in Europe seems to me to lie solely in a kind of universal disintegration, whereas I like to see in the person of this Oriental a precocious striving after individualism.
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 150