From the Beam (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Paul Antschel
- First Published: 1971
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: World War II, Jews or Jewish life, Death or dying, Ships, Holocaust, Jewish, Joy or sorrow
The Poem
“From the Beam” is a short poem composed of nineteen short lines of free verse. It is a spare, tight poem, and some of the lines (in the translation) consist of a single word. Poets who compress their thoughts to the fewest possible words, claiming that “less is more”—the less on the surface, the more beneath—are known as minimalists. Paul Celan identified with no school of poetry, but this poem, which uses only sixty-odd words in its nineteen lines, exemplifies the concentration of the minimalist poets.
This poem is one of Celan’s last poems and...
[The entire page is 1475 words long]
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