Michael Hamburger is one of the most active and multifaceted English poets and scholars working today. In addition to having more than two dozen books and pamphlets of his poetry published since 1945, he has been an influential critic of romantic and...

[The miscellaneous pieces about British and German authors contained in Art as Second Nature: Occasional Pieces 1950–74] are more than just crumbs of an intellectual banquet, and one remarkable trait is the extent to which they penetrate their respective topics in depth, within the generally very narrow compass allowed by literary journalism. Quick sharp probings they are, and it is no wonder that Hamburger should turn out to be so frequently quotable in a book that introduces itself to us in the dem...

The second edition [of Reason and Energy: Studies in German Literature] contains only one essay that is quite new: a comparative study of Milton and Hölderlin entitled 'The Sublime Art'…. 'The Sublime Art' has the merit of dealing with two poets whose likenesses and differences are sufficiently interesting to make a comparative study worth while. And it has the further merit of focussing attention on Samson Agonistes and Empedocles, works which are genuinely compara...

Michael Hamburger is an English poet of recent German ancestry, a fact that makes it easy to understand the unhappy historical consciousness that marks his work. The title of his book, "Weather and Season," seems rather commonplace—until one realizes the importance in it of the two poems, "Homage to the Weather" and "In a Cold Season." The former of these is a beautiful evocation of remembered moments in many places, summoned up by the sudden appearance of be...