Volume 43, Number 18 · November 14, 1996
Poet of Holy Dread
By John Bayley
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew
by John Felstiner
Yale University Press, 344 pp., $30.00
It makes little sense to ask who is the finest poet of the postwar era—Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, Larkin might all seem to qualify if we are considering Anglo-Americans—but there seems little doubt who has the strongest claims to being unique. Paul Celan's subject was something about which no true poetry came from any other poet—the Holocaust. Many poems have been written that speak about it, in the appropriate style of emotion, but they do not become it: they cannot realize it in the unique voice of poetry. Celan alone made its world his own, as a poet.
Review, 3598 words
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