Volume 28, Number 10 · June 11, 1981
Elbe Swans and Other Poets
By Stephen Spender
The Meeting at Telgte
by Günter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Helen and Kurt Wolff, 147 pp., $9.95
The date is 1647—or perhaps Herr Grass would prefer to say 1647/1947. The meeting of German poets at Telgte, between Osnabrück and Münster, takes place while the Thirty Years War is drawing to a close, three years before the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, and during the period of prolonged negotiations. The 200 states and sees which constituted the Germany of that era are devastated. The war which began as the culmination of the Counter-Reformation has fanned out into a multiplicity of wars, not all of them between Catholics and Protestants, some between co-religionists. For many years:
Review, 2175 words
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