SOURCE: “Gottfried Benn's Attic Triptych,” in Germanic Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, December, 1961, pp. 298-307.

In the following essay, Wood traces the roots of Benn's poetry in ancient Greek culture, focusing on Benn's “triptych” of poems entitled “V. jahrhundert.”

One interesting aspect of Benn's work that has not received the attention it deserves is his relationship to the classical heritage of antiquity and to the part this plays within the framework of his post-Nietzschean nihilism and his poetics based thereon. The topic is important not only for its bearing on Benn's poetry (and I am concerned here only with the poetry) but also for the light it throws on that ever-fruitful theme of “the tyranny of Greece and Rome over Germany.” A good many poems of Benn derive their matter from Greek themes or motifs, not to mention at least two prose essays (“Dorische Welt” [1934] and “Pallas” [1943]), both of which...