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This article considers one of the most enigmatic texts of Hölderlin's poetics, the fragment on the 'The Meaning of Tragedies'. Despite the currently accepted later dating (1802-04), the text is often read in terms of the concept of metaphorical expression found in the earlier Homburg poetics. However, I suggest that if the concept of metaphor is present, it is in the form of two limiting extremes, corresponding to the terms 'das Lebenslicht' and 'das Zeichen = o' respectively. If the former corresponds to an extreme of non-figurative expression, the latter corresponds to an opposite and paradoxical extreme of figurative presentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on poetic theory of German poet Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, with reference to his essay "Der Film in Worten." The author argues that Brinkmann's poetic theory consisted of his reading and understanding of American writers, and his poetry of surface combined the visual element focusing on everyday and popular culture. The author comments that in "Der Film in Worten" Brinkmann explains poetic projection of surface, visuals in lyric poetry, and criticizes his contemporaries.

By taking the work of the German-speaking poet Paul Celan into consideration, as well as his reflections on poetic practice, I shall, in the present article, question the notion of ethical dynamics deriving from an interdependent relationship between poetic space and practice. Such dynamics, in turn, establishes itself as a possibility of both transformation and outliving of the place that poetry takes in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the literary influence of authors such as Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, and Osip Mandel’shtam on the poetics of German poet Durs Grünbein. Grünbein's essay collection "Galilei vermißt Dantes Hölle," his metropolitan poetic persona for depicting urban life, and Mandel’shtam's death in exile in Siberia are discussed.

Within the context of prosodic feature analysis, this essay discusses some German manifestations of hexameter verse from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Samples of hexameters by seven German poets--Johann Heinrich Voss, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, Eduard M6rike, Friedrich Hebbel, Thomas Mann, and Bertolt Brecht--are compared on both the metrical and the prosodic level of analysis. The metrical pattern for the German hexameter line allows for sixteen distinct line-types based solely on the distribution of syllables in nonprominent positions of the meter, and the data show that most poets favored certain line-types and tended to avoid others. Voss, Goethe, Schiller, and Hebbel, for example, favored line-types that begin with the configuration xoxoox (where x and o represent syllables in prominent and nonprominent positions, respectively), while Brecht preferred lines that are dactylic throughout, and Mann displayed no clear preference for any particular line-type. The data for the metrical configurations also reveal a strong similarity between the hexameters favored by Goethe and Hebbel, despite the fact that Hebbel's were written about sixty years after Goethe's. On the prosodic level, there are striking differences between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and the twentieth-century poets (i.e., Mann and Brecht). For example, compound words containing contiguous stressed syllables, which occur only rarely in hexameter verse by Goethe, Schiller, and Hebbel, were consistently used in the same metrical relation by other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets; Mann was inconsistent in his use of this word-type; and Brecht almost always placed it precisely in a metrical relation which the earlier poets invariably avoided. Among other things, Brecht's prosodic style is marked by the extremely high overall frequency of this word-type, including multiple occurrences in single lines. In terms of both feature assignme... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]