Michael Hamburger

First published in 1982, The Truth of Poetry attempts to answer a seemingly simple question: What kind of truth does poetry offer in modern times? Michael Hamburger’s answer to this question ranges over the last century of European and American poetry, and the result is a phenomenology of modern poetry rather than a history of appreciations of individual poets. Stressing the tensions and conflicts in and behind the work of every major poet of the period, he considers the many different possibilities open to poets since Baudelaire. This expansive work of analysis will be of interest to students of English literature, poetry enthusiasts and literary historians.

First published in 1982, The Truth of Poetry attempts to answer a seemingly simple question: What kind of truth does poetry offer in modern times? Michael Hamburger’s answer to this question ranges over the last century of European and American poetry, and the result is a phenomenology of modern poetry rather than a history of appreciations of individual poets. Stressing the tensions and conflicts in and behind the work of every major poet of the period, he considers the many different possibilities open to poets since Baudelaire. This expansive work of analysis will be of interest to students of English literature, poetry enthusiasts and literary historians.

Originally published in 1957, this volume brings together a collection of essays and hard to source translations on both well and lesser known German writers and poets, including Hölderlin, Benn, Mann and Nietzsche. The essays are linked by a consideration of the tension between the desire for what Thomas Mann called ‘the miracle of ingeniousness regained’ and the constrains of reason. The book shows how this tension contributes toward the prophetic nature of so much 18th and 19th Century German literature and its modernity, which qualities are also placed in the context of German political and social conditions. All prose quotations are given in English translation, and the majority of verse quotations in both German and English.

Originally published in 1957, this volume brings together a collection of essays and hard to source translations on both well and lesser known German writers and poets, including Hölderlin, Benn, Mann and Nietzsche. The essays are linked by a consideration of the tension between the desire for what Thomas Mann called ‘the miracle of ingeniousness regained’ and the constrains of reason. The book shows how this tension contributes toward the prophetic nature of so much 18th and 19th Century German literature and its modernity, which qualities are also placed in the context of German political and social conditions. All prose quotations are given in English translation, and the majority of verse quotations in both German and English.

The Michael Hamburger Reader is the definitive collection of poems, translations, essays, interviews and personal reflections by one of the most influential Anglo-German writers of the last century. Dennis O’Driscoll – a friend and fellow poet – has distilled Hamburger’s giant oeuvre into an essential volume that defines his legacy. The translations from German, Italian and French start with Goethe and Hölderlin and end with W. G. Sebald, via Celan, Bachmann, Brecht, and Nelly Sachs, among others. Hamburger’s own poems, with their subtle musical and philosophical inquiry, are generously sampled, as are his critical essays on major European writers, from Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn to Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot.

Contents: Poems and Verse Plays; Plays and Libretti; Hofmannsthal's Debt to the English-speaking World Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Contents: Poems and Verse Plays; Plays and Libretti; Hofmannsthal's Debt to the English-speaking World Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Michael Hamburger's fifth collection since the publication of "Collected Poems 1941-1994" gathers his poems written during 2004-2006, a productive period in which he has set aside translation work to concentrate on his own poetry. His intimate knowledge of the English landscape and wildlife underpins his meditations on mortality and the passing of time in these subtle and compelling poems.

"Wild and Wounded" collects Michael Hamburger's shorter poems since "Intersections" (2000). It is published to mark the 80th birthday of one of Britain's leading poets of the last half-century. The dominant theme in these poems is the passing of time - whether referring to the injured swan in the collection's title poem, a tree 'surreptitiously dying', or the poet himself, comtemplating...difficulties with grammar now, with tense, With mood, with person, case - and, yes, the sense. As illness, frailty, absence and obsolescence become more pressing to the poet, his poems, by contrast, achieve an enthralling robustness and vigour.

"From a Diary of Non-Events" captures a year in the life of Michael Hamburger, from December 2000 to November 2001, observing changes in the natural world alongside the preoccupations and ruminations of the poet in and around his home in a Suffolk village. Occasionally intruding upon these 'non-events' are the larger concerns of the outside world. Hamburger's skill in synthesizing the two strands results in a compelling narrative in which, as in all great sequences, the whole strikes us as more than the sum of its parts.

Paul Celan is one the twentieth century's most essential poets, and twenty-two years after its publication, Poems of Paul Celan continues to be the single truest access for English-speakers to this poet's work. This new edition adds ten more poems and a significant essay, "On Translating Celan" by Michael Hamburger.