"Paul Celan: Studies in His Early Poetry" scrutinizes the
influences detectable in the poems written during 1938-48. Among
German writers, Buchner, Goethe, Gottfried von Strassburg,
Gryphius, Morike, the poet of the "Nibelungenlied," Novalis, Rilke,
and Trakl all provided motifs that, often repeated, make for a
dense network inviting attention to the self-referential and
self-revealing patterns in Celan's early work. In addition, there
are many poems that contain motifs gleaned from Greek mythology
and/or biblical data. These references, on occasion quite clear,
more often so obscure as to be hazy allusions, yield the view that
during his first decade of poetic activities Celan becomes
increasingly recondite. When these references or allusions stand
side-by-side in a given poem, they acquire a surrealistic tint and
threaten to withhold clear meaning. Ambiguities, deliberately
cultivated in the earliest poems, begin to boomerang and read like
so many preludes to the struggles with language evident in the
poetry of Celan's maturity. It is a certainty that Celan reacted
quickly, if not immediately, to the events befalling the scenes of
his early years (Czernowitz and the forced-labor camp). This
phenomenon mandates the view of his poems as so many pieces of
autobiography. It thus is inevitable that as early as 1940 he wrote
against the backdrop of war, and soon thereafter in the shadow of
the Holocaust that was destined to brand his mind forever. This
volume is meant for anyone interested in Celan, close reading of
modern poetry in general, comparative literature, motif studies,
poetic reactions to Holocaust events, or even in a Jew's concept
regarding the role of the deity in the destruction of those for
whom the poet speaks.
General
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