Twenty-Five German Poets: A Bilingual Collection

by Walter Kaufmann

Book Overview

The book spans three centuries--opening with Angelus Silesius, Klopstock, Claudius, Goethe, and Schiller, and ending with Brecht and B ll--but it has considerable continuity. The prefaces for each of the twenty-five poets integrate the selections into a story, and often poems by different writers invite comparison. For example, almost all of the poets express an attitude toward death. Not only would many discussions of death be better if the authors...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393007715
• ISBN13: 9780393007718
• Release Date: September 1976
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

More Still Than Deeper in His Soul

I would like to have the more recent version of this book, but it is hardly necessary. I have the First Printing of 20 German Poets from 1962, and I am not trying to sell it. It provides me with a better perspective on Kaufmann's philosophy, pulled together from his years of seeking to comprehend what was truly worthy in German culture, and pictured perfectly as a couplet by Schiller. "Deutsches Reich" "Germany? But where is it? I cannot find such a country. / Where the culture begins, ends the political realm." I would be happy if Kaufmann had learned a bit more from his efforts to evaluate the great German poets, but he may have comforted himself by knowing that each of them had also written a lot which wasn't very good. It is hardest to learn when one shouldn't write poems. Or maybe we were supposed to learn how we may suffer more from the knowledge of how life can resemble the worst poems more than the best of philosophies, in deeper bitterness. To make things worse, when people put everything in the world to music now, sometimes the music is so good that the thoughts don't want to go away. In one of his later works, I believe Walter Kaufmann expressed regret that he had never studied music, as if translating some of the most critical comments ever rendered on music drama counted for nothing, and as if there was some affliction here, but he didn't get it. But he had been so busy: the German poets were a better match for his personal problems than he ever knew, and he was lucky that he had so much to choose from to inform a public that could suddenly make such intellectual attainment popular in a deeply personal way, like I had never experienced it before. Writing in 1961, W.K. chose to say "This volume is not an anthology but aims to be a book of one piece." That kind of goal didn't figure that life could be lived by changing channels.