Volume 36, Number 21 · January 18, 1990
Poet of the Great Massacre
By J.M. Cameron
Poems of Paul Celan
translated and with an introduction by Michael Hamburger
Persea Books, 350 pp., $24.95
The character of Paul Celan's work raises the question how far poetry can be—is—a central human activity in our time. Even when Milton played with the thought of writing a poem 'doctrinal to a nation,' at first having in mind an Arthuriad, such a project, in a lively form, was scarcely possible. Milton had in mind Homer and Virgil. Homer was certainly doctrinal to a nation, a principal source of moral and theological ideas current in Hellenic culture, and this was the ground for Plato's attack upon his poems—they taught false doctrines and offered bad examples. Virgil was not the shaper of a culture but rather the celebrant of a certain moment in the history of the Roman republic. His real triumph was in the Middle Ages, when he is taken to be a prophet, or a magician, and in the early modern period:
Review, 2393 words
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