At the age of seventeen Hofmannsthal stunned the Viennese intelligentsia with his poetry, drama, and criticism. At twenty-five he stopped writing; when he resumed three years later, he wrote in forms far different from those which had won him early fame. The three-year silence was broken by The Letter of Lord Chandos in which a fictitious young nobleman writes to Sir Francis Bacon replying to inquiries about his two years of literary silence. Brett's persuasive analysis of the Letter indicates that during Hofmannsthal's early period of creativity his relationship to language was one of symbiotic merger; after the silent period his relationship to language reflected separateness from the mother and identification with the father.