Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William H. McClain

SOURCE: "The Imaging of Transformation in Nelly Sachs's Holocaust Poems," in Hebrew University Studies in Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2, Autumn, 1980, pp. 281-300.

In the following essay, McClain examines the "images of transformation" in Sachs's Holocaust poems, and discusses poems which provide insight into the personal losses the Holocaust imposed on her.

One of Nelly Sachs's most revealing comments about her writing is her statement in an early letter to her friend Walter Berendsohn that her aim as a poet was "… die Verwandlung der Materie in das uns jenseitig Verborgene" ("the transmutation of the material into that which is hidden from us in the beyond"). One of the ways in which she sought to realize this aim technically was to transpose into various images of transformation her intuitions of the connections between the visible world and an invisible higher reality. She created several of these images for the...
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