Volume 10, Number 7 · April 11, 1968
Between Hölderlin and Himmler
By D.J. Enright
Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, by Jerome Rothenberg. and the Author
Atheneum, 177 pp., (paperback $2.95) (paper)
It is scarcely the case that we live in a time when literary conventions are so narrow and stifling that 'poetry' must become, for the poet, a dirty word. Far from it. Poetically, anything goes, and the louder the faster, though perhaps not very far. So the more one considers the title of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's volume of selected poems—with English translations facing the German text, except on one occasion—the more sadly irrelevant or even senseless it comes to seem. People who don't read poems don't read poems.
Review, 1093 words
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