Poet of Expressionist Berlin: Life and Work of Georg Heym - Hardcover

Bridgwater, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1870352750 ISBN 13: 9781870352758

Publisher: Libris, 2001

Synopsis

Georg Heym (1887-1912) rebelled against his conservative background--his father was a Prussian, legal official--and was an explosive presence in Berlin bohemian circles from 1910 until his early death. Shortly before, in a review of the only volume of his poetry published in his lifetime, a Berlin critic likened him to Arthur Rimbaud and named him the most outstanding young poet in Germany.
Heym is celebrated for his concentrated, tightly-strung poetry which contains disturbing images of past and future, individual and mass destruction and mania. In this extensive critical and biographical study, Patrick Bridgwater discusses the whole of Heym's poetic output--over forty poems are quoted in full in the original German, with accompanying English prose translations--and shows that Heym's poetic achievement is considerably more varied and richer than its reputation hitherto. In addition, he gives an account of Heym as a playwright, and as the author of some of the most powerful short stories written in German that can stand beside those of Kleist and Kafka.
Heym kept a series of journals and diaries, and copious use is made of these, of Heym's correspondence, and of the numerous memoirs by his fellow poets and writers, to build up a full-length portrait of the personality of Georg Heym, and to give an account of the multifarious literary and pictorial sources of his imagination, which included Holderlin, Buchner, Shelley, Keats, Baudelaire, Van Gogh and Munch.
Bridgwater ends his study with a discussion of Heym's place in the general topography of neo-romanticism and German Expressionism, and cautions against too strict a confinement within Expressionist categories of the work of one of the major voices of early twentieth-century German literature.

About this title

Synopsis:

An account of one of the leading poets of early (pre-World War I) German 20th century literature. This is a biography and a critical study, which also works as an introduction to the early modern German literary scene, in particular the literary life and letters of pre-1914 Berlin. Heym is recognized as one of the great European big-city poets, in the tradition of Baudelaire. Over 40 of his poems are quoted in full in the book, in their German original with accompanying English prose translations, put in context and discussed. Heym was in many ways an ideal representative type of German literary Expressionism: a rebel against his authoritarian and conservative family and background.

About this edition

• Publisher: Libris
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1870352750
• ISBN 13: 9781870352758
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312