2 - “Flaschenpost” and “Wurfholz”: Reflections on Paul Celan's Poems and Poetics

Summary

While Gottfried Benn spoke of the monologic character of the poem, “the poem, addressed to nobody,” Celan insisted on the dialogical nature of “every true poem.” In any case, both refer very often to a “you” in their poems, which can be the lyrical ego, a beloved woman, or even the reader.

In his concept of dialogue, Celan was influenced by the Russian poetical movement of Acmeism (from Greek acme: peak or culmination), a literary group formed as a counter to symbolism. It brought together poets such as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolaj Gumilev in 1912–13. When he was composing his Büchner Prize acceptance speech, Der Meridian, Celan came across the Acmeists' polemics against traditional Symbolists, and also read Mandelstam's essay On the Nature of the Word and Gumilev's Letters on Russian Poetry. Both Mandelstam and Gumilev not only saw dialogue as being central to their idea of the poem, but as something that reflected their idea of a literary community. When Mandelstam says: “There are no lyrics without dialogue,” he is referring to the reader as well as to the text itself. Or, as Gumilev says, the poet always speaks to somebody, while for Anna Akhmatova the reader is the invisible friend of the poet. The poet must remain at a great distance to the reader to remain free, of course, but he is there, looks after him from this distance.