Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Hunter G. Hannum

Critical Essay by Hunter G. Hannum

SOURCE: “Gottfried Benn's Music,” in Germanic Review, Vol. 40, No. 3, May, 1965, pp. 225-39.

In the following essay, Hannum discusses the musicality in Benn's poetry, and suggests that he is as much a Romantic poet as he is an Expressionist.

                                        “… eine Erde aus Nihilismus und Musik.”(1)

To the reader who is familiar with Gottfried Benn primarily as the poet of Morgue, a series of sharply cynical poems depicting the decay of the human body and its society written during the hey-day of Expressionism, it may come as a surprise to hear that Benn's poems, taken as a whole, are among the most musical in German poetry since Romanticism. This statement immediately calls for some definition of what we mean by the “musicality” of verse, a term which is not so clear as it might be, although unfailingly cited in connection with poets as diverse as, for example,...
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