Paul Celan - Todesfugue

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Romania of German-speaking Jewish parents. (Celan is an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his name.) They spoke German at home at his mother's insistence; she was a passionate student of German literature. Celan also knew Romanian, Russian and French, and could understand Yiddish, a German Jewish dialect. Celan went to France to study medicine in 1938, but returned to Romania in 1939 to study literature instead. First the Russians and then the Nazis took over the part of Romania in which he lived. Forced into a Jewish Ghetto created by the Nazis, he translated the sonnets of William Shakespeare and continued to write his own poetry. In 1942 both of his parents were captured and taken to concentration camps, where they died. Celan was made to do forced labor until 1944, when the Russians drove out the Nazis and took over again. Celan wrote Todesfugue at the end of the war, using accounts of the death camps he had heard when the camps were liberated. After the war he moved to Bucharest, where he worked as an editor and translator and changed his name. In 1948 he moved to Paris to study German philology and literature. He became a French citizen in 1955 and remained in France for the rest of his life. He committed suicide in 1970 by drowning himself in the Seine River.

Celan struggled with the irony of writing in German. It was both the language that connected him to his family, especially his mother, and the language spoken by the country that had killed his parents, uncle, and numerous other close friends and family members. He struggled with survivor guilt and depression, but became one of the major German language poets of the 20th century in spite of this. In 1958 we won the Bremen Prize for poetry and in 1960 the Georg Buechner Prize.

Of language, Celan wrote:

"Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all." (from "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen", p.34, in Celan's Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.

You can hear Celan read "Todesfugue" by clicking on the link at the end of the poem on this site.

Musee des Beaux Arts - another Auden poem, with painting

"Musee des Beaux Arts" is a poem about art and suffering, and the ways in which our perspective influences what we care about. Although it's a very different poem than "September 1, 1939," it touches on some of the same themes and was written at about the same time. The Musee des Beaux Arts is a museum in Brussels, Belgium.

To make his point that suffering goes on all around us, yet we pay little attention, Auden describes a painting by Flemish painter Pieter Breughel the elder called "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." The painting focuses on a plowman in a landscape, and in the lower right hand corner there is a leg sticking out of the corner--Icarus.

Check out some informal, student-friendly commentary on Schmoop.

William Carlos Williams also wrote a poem about this painting with the same title.

Researching Poetry

Doing college level research and writing is one of the objectives of this course. Why not do it with poetry?

But how?!

First, it's helpful to look at the age of the poem and the context. Poems that have been around for a while in the public and academic consciousness will most certainly have been the subject of literary criticism or academic research. The way to find almost ANYTHING credible written about a literary topic is to explore the MLA International bibliography. You can find a link to this bibliography on the Goshen College Good Library web page.

There are several ways to find the MLA International Bibliography. (MLA stands for the Modern Language Association. This database indexes articles on literature written on ALL modern language literatures.)

1) Go under "Books and Articles" heading and click on A-Z Databases. You will find it alphabetically under "ML." Note: Do not click on the MLA List of Periodicals. That is a different database.

2) Go to EBSCO (listed on the left hand side of the page) and log in. Then look for the MLA International Bibliography.

Searching: Try several different searches before you give up. When I was looking up W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939," I found different results for "W H Auden" and "September 1, 1939" than I did for "Auden" and "September 1, 1939." Which search terms do you think offered more results?

Depending on how many items you get, you may want to narrow further.

Don't simply go for the full text articles. Look over the range of "hits" you got in your search. Notice the subjects and types of things written about. If there's an article you really want and it's not available in full text, you can order it through interlibrary loan with a few clicks. Most articles will come free to your inbox within a week and you will be able to read and download them for a period of about 2 weeks.

The MLA bibliography does not index articles in newspapers, popular magazines, or on websites. (It does index some articles from online journals--including the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing, which I edit.) If you want to find materials from the popular press, look at the Academic Search Premiere database or the Historical New York Times database (if it's in The New York Times).

Make sure to write down all the citations of the articles you download or use for your research. Most databases will now give you the option of downloading a citation in your preferred citation style.

The preferred citation style for the class is MLA style. You will find further information on the Good Library website, the Purdue OWL, and in your Hacker Pocket Handbook purchased for this course.

Can you find these articles on Auden's "September 1, 1939"?


Burt, Stephen, "'September 1, 1939' Revisited: Or, Poetry, Politics, and the Idea of the Public," American Literary History, 2003 Fall; 15 (3): 533-59.

Miller, James, "Auden's 'September 1, 1939,'" Explicator, 2004 Winter; 62 (2): 115-18.


Wormser, Baron, "Meeting the Agony: Three Poems of the Twentieth Century," Sewanee Review, 2008 Summer; 116 (3): 411-427.

Sonnets

A sonnet is a "little song." A very old form that originated in medieval Italy, the sonnet was first made popular by Petrarch, who serenaded his lady love Laura with sonnets.

The Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet is a poem of 14 lines that has the following form and rhyme scheme:

abba abba cdecde or some other variation of cd or cde, such as ccddee or cddcee or cdcdee or cdcdcd. (Because an Italian sonnet can end with a rhymed couplet, you need to look carefully at the rest of the poem to make sure it's not an English sonnet--which is described further down below.)

As Nelson Miller says in his excellent online guide to sonnets, the sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines that attempts to contrast two ideas, or bring together to different things, or to raise a question and answer.

The Italian sonnet, therefore, is often referred to having an octave (two quatrains) and a sestet. There is often something referred to as a "turn" in the poem because of the shift from one idea to its contrasting counterpart. The octave and the sestet are marked by the rhyme scheme rather than by obvious stanza breaks, because sonnets are usually printed in one "chunk."

The English sonnet, also referred to as the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet, allows for a bit more variety in rhyme. This is in keeping with the demands of English, which has a very rich vocabulary, but fewer rhymes. There are several variations on the English sonnet, including the Spencerian Sonnet and the Wordsworthian sonnet, which incorporate aspects of the Italian sonnet. English sonnets are written in iambic pentameter. See Nelson's website (above) for more detail on this.

Meanwhile, here's a basic overview of the Shakespearean sonnet.

Rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. Many times you will find a list of questions or points in the three quatrains, and a point or commentary in the final couplet.

Often poets have written sonnet cycles, or a "crown" of sonnets, in which sonnets on the same theme share first and last lines -- the second one beginning with the last line of the first one and so on until the final one, which ends with the first line of the first sonnet. A heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of fifteen sonnets that follows this pattern--the fifteenth sonnet is then made up of one line from each of the preceding sonnets.

Hope this basic guide is helpful as you do the work of wrestling with Brooks's off-rhymed sonnets in the sequence "Gay Chaps at the Bar."

After working with Brooks's sonnets and reading Rules for the Dance, will experiment with writing our own sonnets.

Dancing with Formal Poetry

For the past week or two we've been reading poems from World War I and World War II and the period in between. Many of the poems we've studied combine modern realism with the use of metrical form: Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, Auden's September 1, 1939, and now Gwendolyn Brooks's sonnet sequence, Gay Chaps at the Bar. Alongside the study of these poems we've been reading Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance, a poet's study of the poetry of sound.

This week we'll be posting on segments of Auden's and Brooks's poetry. As we trace the references and allusions in the poems, and tease out their imagery, let's also apply our study of meter as we try to understand why these poems have moved readers from several generations. Although these are modern poems, their use of formal elements for tough, realistic approaches to traumatic subject matter suggests a desire to re-order the world through language patterns.

Here are some overall questions to consider about the poem "September 1, 1939":

What's the metrical line length of this poem?

What's the meter of "September 1, 1939's" most famous line, "We must love each other or die?"

Although Auden later repudiated "September 1, 1939" (much as T. S. Eliot dismissed "The Wasteland" after writing it), readers have kept it alive. For instance, it was the most frequently quoted poem after 9/11. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them I think lies in its sound patterns, its rhythms, and the feelings that are conveyed through sound.

Class, as you post on the stanza of this poem you were assigned, please make sure to note the meter and speculate on questions of sound, as well as of tone, image, and meaning.

Here's my post on the first stanza:


I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Auden begins this poem from a worldly perch in a bar in New York, giving us the street address--midtown Manhattan--as he meditates on the end of "a low dishonest decade," the 1930s. A sinister international event has happened--Germany's invasion of Poland is inferred by the date of the poem, though it is not mentioned--bringing "waves of anger and fear" and "the unmentionable odour of death." Auden tells us that this event "obsess[es] our private lives," but he also shows us through the speaker of the poem who shares a private moment of his brooding obsession with this event.

Although this is a brooding and contemplative poem, its lines are rather short. Mary Oliver suggests that pentameter lines are the proper length for meditation, but these lines are shorter than pentameter, giving the poem's meditation a sense of agitation. The meter is iambic, but there are numerous anapest sprinkled throughout, rushing the line along, as though intermixing the regular heartbeat of the iamb with a skipping, panicky beat. The most sinister line of the stanza, the 10th--"the unmentionable odour of death"--has a hypersyllabic anapesitc rhythm, with the hypersyllable occuring in the middle to accommodate the 5 syllables of "unmentionable." This irregularity keeps this line from singing and intensifies its panicky heartbeat.

The opening 11-line stanza doesn't have a regular rhyme scheme, but it has several pairs of rhymes: The first and the ninth line (dives, lives), the third and the fifth line (afraid, decade), the seventh and the eleventh line (bright, night), and the ninth and eleventh lines end with a slant rhyme (earth, death). It's as though the poem can't find a regular form because the event it is trying to absorb threatens chaos, even as the mind seeks order.

OK--so let's see what insights you all will add to this in your posts! Looking forward to it;-)