Truth of Poetry

What kind of truth does modern poetry offer? Michael Hamburger's approach to this question ranges over European and American poetry since Baudelaire and the result is one of the best introductions available to twentieth-century poetry and its antecedents. Stressing the tensions and conflicts in and behind the work of almost every major poet of the period, Hamburger's non-partisan approach and practitioner's appreciation of the aesthetic problems ensure that the many different possibilities open to poets since Baudelaire are lucidly and sympathetically discussed.
 
Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924, and came to Britain as a child. He has taught widely in America and Britain and is the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. His awards include the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for services to German literature. Anvil publishes several of his translations, including editions of Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke and Poems of Paul Celan, which received the EC's European Translation Prize in 1990. His poem-sequence 'Late' appeared in 1997.