Preface

Summary

THE PERCEPTION OF Georg Trakl (1887–1914) as one of the most distinctive and compelling poetic voices of his age, both within the German-speaking world and beyond, is reflected in the proliferation of studies of his life and work that began in the middle of the twentieth century. The abundance of secondary literature produced since then, however, can hardly be said to have brought about a corresponding increase in the level of understanding of Trakl's poetry among specialist or lay readers. Many of the most dedicated and influential scholars have themselves concluded that his poems, for all their resonance and beauty, remain largely impervious to attempts to make sense of them, an idea whose grip is evidenced by its longevity. In 1954, Clemens Heselhaus opened his study of the “Elis” poems with a lengthy meditation on the “hermeticism” of Trakl's work, a term also employed repeatedly more than half a century later by Hans-Georg Kemper in his 2009 essay on Trakl's “magical transformation of non-sense into deep-sense”; while in the first historicalcritical edition of 1969, editors Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar characterized the poetry as “moving ever more frequently along the limits of the sayable,” an assessment echoed in 2007 by Hermann Zwerschina and Eberhard Sauermann in the introduction to their historical-critical edition, in which they identify the preservation of “the primary obscurity” of Trakl's poems as one of the fundamental principles of their own editorial work. As its constant reiteration suggests, resignation to the ultimate incomprehensibility of the poetry has become something of a self-perpetuating topos of Trakl scholarship. Of its many formulations, one of the neatest is provided by Martin Seymour-Smith in his encyclopedic Guide to Modern World Literature: “It seems to be demonstrable that it succeeds in achieving (at its best) a full coherence. But such demonstrations cannot be made in familiar critical terms.”

By setting received notions of impenetrability aside, the present study reevaluates the extent to which the coherence of Trakl's poetry is not only intuitable but also describable. More specifically, it undertakes to show that the poetry—erratically and tentatively in its early stages, but with growing control and self-assurance—encodes a rapidly crystallizing worldview with tightly interwoven affective, ethical, social, historical, and cosmological dimensions, and that the material and methods it employs to do so are continuously reused, refined, or re-thought according to their fitness for purpose.