Poetry after Auschwitz

Susan Gubar

"In this study Susan Gubar demonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, North American and British writers struggled to keep memory of it alive.". "Many contemporary writers - among them Anthony Hecht, Gerald Stern, Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Michael Hamburger, Irena Klepfisz, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Jacqueline Osherow, and Anne Michaels - have grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. Through confessional verse and reinventions of the elegy, as well as documentary poems about photographs and trials, poets serve as proxy-witnesses of events that they did not experience firsthand. By speaking about or even as the dead, these men and women of...

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