Originally published in 1957, this volume brings together a collection of essays and hard to source translations on both well and lesser known German writers and poets, including Hoelderlin, Benn, Mann and Nietzsche. The essays are linked by a consideration of the tension between the desire for what Thomas Mann called 'the miracle of ingeniousness regained' and the constrains of reason. The book shows how this tension contributes toward the prophetic nature of so much 18th and 19th Century German literature and its modernity, which qualities are also placed in the context of German political and social conditions. All prose quotations are given in English translation, and the majority of verse quotations in both German and English.

First published in 1982, The Truth of Poetry attempts to answer a seemingly simple question: What kind of truth does poetry offer in modern times? Michael Hamburger's answer to this question ranges over the last century of European and American poetry, and the result is a phenomenology of modern poetry rather than a history of appreciations of individual poets. Stressing the tensions and conflicts in and behind the work of every major poet of the period, he considers the many different possibilities open to poets since Baudelaire. This expansive work of analysis will be of interest to students of English literature, poetry enthusiasts and literary historians.

Originally published in 1957, this volume brings together a collection of essays and hard to source translations on both well and lesser known German writers and poets, including Hoelderlin, Benn, Mann and Nietzsche. The essays are linked by a consideration of the tension between the desire for what Thomas Mann called 'the miracle of ingeniousness regained' and the constrains of reason. The book shows how this tension contributes toward the prophetic nature of so much 18th and 19th Century German literature and its modernity, which qualities are also placed in the context of German political and social conditions. All prose quotations are given in English translation, and the majority of verse quotations in both German and English.

Poetry. The English poet Michael Hamburger, author of the introduction to the present volume, has long championed Hans W. Cohn, writing of his work: they are existential parables written with an extraordinary precision, and without the aid of rhetoric or conventional pathos. If they are all the more poignant for that it is because they have been refined and distilled to their essence, like certain short prose-parables by Kafka. Cohn's work] is distinguished by a scrupulous spareness and his poems are reductions of experience to its bare bones. WITH ALL FIVE SENSES is translated by the poet's brother, writer Frederick G. Cohn.

As well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. No British poet can match him in his range of interests and his moral passion. Enzensberger is a cultured, learned, widely knowledgeable man, but his poems wear their knowledge, learning and culture very lightly. Perfectly at ease in a variety of poetic forms, he presents us again and again with things that matter. This is intelligent and pointed poetry in the tradition of Brecht, humanely political and generously engaged. The poems have the ease and the lightness of real mastery. They are moral in their insistence that human life can be lived well or badly, that it is up to us to choose well and to act wisely. Enzensberger is now writing with an increasing awareness of mortality, yet addresses social and political dangers and evils with undiminished urgency. This is a dual language edition expanding Enzensberger's earlier Bloodaxe Selected Poems with work from his later collections Kiosk, Lighter Than Air and A History of Clouds. The translations are by Enzensberger himself and by Michael Hamburger, David Constantine and Esther Kinsky.

Three men walk the pages of W. G. Sebald’s first literary work – the painter Mathias Grünewald, the botanist G. W. Steller and W. G. Sebald himself. Written as a long poem in three parts, After Nature delves into each of these lives in turn, teasing out the haunting uncertainties of the past and revealing the terrible burden that history places on all of our shoulders.

Contents: Poems and Verse Plays; Plays and Libretti; Hofmannsthal's Debt to the English-speaking World Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Contents: Poems and Verse Plays; Plays and Libretti; Hofmannsthal's Debt to the English-speaking World Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

From the introduction by Michael Hamburger: "Baudelaire's prose poems were written at long intervals during the last twelve or thirteen years of his life. The prose poem was a medium much suited to his habits and character. Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty. His thinking about society and politics, as about everything else, was experimental; like the thinking of most poets it drew on experience and imagination, rather than on facts and general arguments. That is another reason why the prose poem proved a medium so congenial to Baudelaire." Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator for Edgar Allan Poe. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" to describe the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

RAINER MARIA RILKE: Dance the Orange: Selected Poems

Translated by Michael Hamburger and edited by Jeremy Mark Robinson This edition has been revised and updated. www.crmoon.com

This new collection includes poems taken from the time of the great German poet's New Poems through the Duino Elegies to the last pieces. These are some of Rainer Maria Rilke's best works; they are intense, compact, lyrical and lucid, by turns erotic, heartfelt and mystical. Hamburger's excellent translations have the German original facing each poem.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the greatest of all lyrical poets. Rilke is part of that group of European poets and writers which includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, Marina Tsvetajeva, and friends such as Andre Gide, Lou Andreas-Salome and Paul Valery.

Rilke was an incredibly inventive creator of poetry, who could forge the myriad states and images of love, from the delicate, detailed and subtle, to the passionate, illuminating and ecstatic.

Rilke was adept at inflecting language with blissful tones: while he could describe the many experiences of love, he found it difficult to turn them into realities, to act on his words. For him love could be a transitory, fragile state between two people. 'Why do people who love each other separate before there is any need? Because it is after all so very temporary a thing, to be together and to love one another'. Rilke saw life as a 'continuous flow of vicissitudes', change following change, so that parting was inevitable, and people should become used to it ('at any moment be ready to give each other up, let be and not hold each other back'.

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.

Volume One of Brecht's Collected Plays contains Brecht's first performed stage works. Baal is inspired by Brecht's student life in Augsburg and follows the life of a young poet on the rocky road to inspiration; Drums in the Night was written in response to Brecht's experience as a medical orderly in the aftermath of the First World War; and In the Jungle of Cities, set in Chicago, covers the downfall of a family that has moved from the prairies to the jungle of the big city - award-winning in its day, it was described by a leading German daily as the play that 'has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision'.

This volume also includes The Life of Edward II of England, a ballad-like adaptation of Marlowe's original, and five one-act plays The Beggar or the Dead Dog, Driving Out The Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch and A Respectable Wedding in which the bourgeois proceedings take a hilarious turn for the unseemly.

The translators are Jean Benedetti, Eva Geiser and Ernest Borneman, Richard Grunberger, Michael Hamburger, Gerhard Nellhaus, Peter Tegel and John Willett. The translations are ideal for both study and performance. The volume is accompanied by a full introduction and notes by the series editor John Willett and includes Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as all the important textual variants.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is now recognized as one of Europe's supreme poets. Although he was scarcely known to his contemporaries and became deeply unstable in the latter part of his life, when he lived in virtual seclusion, he produced, writes Michael Hamburger, a poetic work 'rich in potentialities and possiblities for the "future ages" in which he placed his hope'. Hölderlin first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for Susette Gontard, the wife of a rich banker to whose children he was tutor. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history from mythological times to the discovery of America and his own era. The 'Canticles of Night', by contrast, include enigmatic fragments in an utterly unprecedented style which anticipates the Symbolists and Surrealists. Throughout his career, he struggled desperately to reconcile his faith in the power of nature, as embodied in the gods of ancient Greece, with conventional Christianity. In this superb bilingual selection, Hamburger has produced the definitive English version of a German literary giant.