Biography EssayPaul Celan (pronounced say-lahn), whom George Steiner has called "almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945," is known primarily for his verse. Yet his reputatio...
Read more
Paul Celan (pronounced say-lahn ), whom George Steiner has called "almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945," is known primarily for his verse. Yet his reputation as a lyric p...
Read more
Critical Essay by Diether H. Haenicke
Celan is the author of the most famous poem written after the war, "Fugue of Death," which treats the atrocities of the concentration camps in a rem...
Read more
Critical Essay by Guy Davenport
Celan's poetry [in Speech-Grille and Selected Poems] reminds me of that of the English poet Christopher Middleton. The words in it tend to stand away from each o...
Read more
Critical Essay by Jerry Glenn
The Germans are not the only objects of scorn in Celan's poetry. The traditional God of Judaism and Christianity is another, and these objects of scorn—I he...
Read more
Critical Essay by Corbet Stewart
Poetic language, in [Celan's] view, has become a rescuing device, a mode of speech barely audible and yet of sufficient intensity to wrench the poem back from t...
Read more
Critical Essay by Jerry Glenn
Dreams and dream imagery constitute an important, if far from pervasive theme in the postwar German lyric….
At first glance, Celan seems to stand in the surrealist...
Read more
Critical Essay by James K. Lyon
The German-language poet Paul Celan has almost achieved the status of a living classic in spite of, or perhaps because of poetry that nearly defies access. Critics gene...
Read more
Critical Essay by Jerry Glenn
[Celan was dissatisifed with many of his early poems collected in Der Sand aus den Urnen (The Sand from the Urns, 1948).]
Many of these early poems are written in rhyme a...
Read more
Critical Essay by Lawrence L. Langer
[Celan's] "Fugue of Death" ("Todesfuge") is perhaps the most celebrated poem on the subject of the Holocaust in Western Europe. ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Friedrich Ulfers
[A] poet is not vaguely subjective or purely emotional, but makes choices from the objectively given lexical and grammatical tradition of the language; and poetry de...
Read more
Critical Essay by Klaus Weissenberger
The most extraordinary case in [the] category of rhythmic innovations is Paul Celan. In addition to the abandoning of traditional meters, one can observe in his p...
Read more
Critical Essay by Michael Hamburger
Paul Celan had no wish to be a confessional poet, except in so far as all poets are confessional, because they must be true to their own experience. Even in the ear...
Read more
Critical Essay by Rika Lesser
Celan's is a poetry of the nonexplicit, the unutterable. It could have sprung fully formed from the head of Wallace Stevens's snow man, for it stems from a ...
Read more
Paul Celan (Paul Antschel)
Paul Antschel
