SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems, in The Listener, Vol. 80, No. 2065, October 24, 1968, p. 542.

In the following favorable review, Enright attempts to position Trakl within a particular school of poetry, at times comparing him to Holderlin.

Georg Trakl, an Austrian, died in 1914, at the age of 27, of an overdose of drugs. This makes him, in the Germanic language of classification, an Expressionist. It only remains to find out what he expressed.

Trakl makes use of a quite constricted range of references and images (the word-counter would have an easy job here!), and many of his poems look like variations on each other. The range of meaning is much harder to assess, because Trakl's meaning is customarily difficult to establish. It is narrow, one would venture, but by no means superficial. The usual comparison is with Hölderlin, and the similarities are obvious enough and (I would say) not very...