[In 1902, Lasker-Schüler's first book of poetry], Styx, appeared. Certain general themes and characteristics which appear in this early volume were to recur—though in different guises and styles—throughout Lasker-Schüler's poetic career. Like a mystical Ovid, Lasker-Schüler saw the world as a tribute to and an embodiment of passion and unfolding life. With her, however, the runic replaces the metamorphic. Nature, like almost everything else in Lasker-Schuler's world, reveals a dynamism beyond itself, possessing special power as a hieroglyph (a word which recurs in both her poetry and prose) of yet another, magical realm. Although images of real flowers appear in her poems, generally the names of her flowers resonate with other meanings, for example, the "Immortelle" of "A Lovesong" ("Ein Liebeslied") (the English translation, "strawflower," cannot, unfortunately, capture the symbolic dimension of the word play). More characteristic are such fabulated flowers as "fireroses" ("Feurrose') in the poem "Parting" ("Abschied") or the "glitterflowers" ("Schimmerblumen") in "Mary of Nazareth" ("Marie von Nazareth"). Just as the poet's intense internal life colors and discovers new forms in creation, so it colors her language. Unable to find an exact German word to serve as counter for the nuance or intensity she needs, the poet simply extends the givens of language, either by playing on words, such as the "me-wards" of "Flight" ("Meinwdrts" instead of "einwdrts" or "inwards") or by devising neologisms through combination, as with the "liebesruhen" (literally, to rest after / from love) of "A Lovesong."

So, too, with love. Its centrality in Lasker-Schüler's life and poetry was bound to a deep conviction that passion, true child of innocence, constituted the essential encounter joining human beings to one another and to God's world. The powerful sensuality in both tone and subject matter of much of Lasker-Schüler's poetry is often wed to an intensely spiritual yearning. Not surprisingly, so exacting an ideal could find little accommodation in what Lasker-Schüler saw as the rigid and loveless actuality of most of the world around her.

Lasker-Schüler's poem "Flight" ("Weltflucht") reveals the poet's need to escape the suffocation of so sterile—and therefore so devastating—a world. The poem rhythmically captures the diastole-systole of the poet's being, maintaining a fine tension between outer and inner. The "whirring" and restless movement seeking an end is simultaneously echoed and reflected on the levels of sound, morphology, and meaning by the words themselves:

Fäden möchte ich um mich ziehen
Wirrwarr endend!
Beirrend,
Euch verwirrend,
Zu entfliehn
Meinwärts.

(O, to draw threads around me,
Ending confusion!
Misleading,
Confusing you,
To escape
Me-wards.)

Yet Lasker-Schuler's deepening estrangement was matched by an equally ardent desire for the passionate communication that alone could sustain her in a coarsening world. She was to love many, but her loves most often ended in disillusionment and loneliness rather than in the oneness of which she dreamed. "My Drama" ("Mein Drama") exposes the pain and the vulnerability of a personal love relationship and ends in a mood of total disaffection with male/female relationships, while "Chaos" expresses the poet's distance from her deepest self.

That longing for communion with the Other was, even during this early period of the poet's life, also frequently directed toward God, and we can recognize its echoes in the early poem "Shulamite" ("Sulamith"). Unlike the other loss of self which the poet suffers in her intercourse with the world, here the poet describes a sensuous dissolution of self that is experienced as a deep mystical consummation:

And I dissolve
With blossoming heartbreak
And I drift away in the universe
Into time,
To forever …

An important influence during this early agitated period in Lasker-Schuler's life was her friendship with the poet Peter Hille. She felt a deep affinity with this poet-prophet's spiritual and dreamlike qualities. After Hille's death in 1902, Lasker-Schüler canonized him as Saint Peter in her first prose work, The Peter Hille Book (Dos Peter HieBuch, 1906), a series of legendary episodes. In this work, Hille is mythicized as a kind of sage, a fairy-tale figure with whom the poet wanders through many lands.

The legendary and mythical character of The Peter Hille Book was but the first example of Lasker-Schüler's tendency to mythicize; soon thereafter she was to create her own mythical world, a pageantry of eclectic figures, such as the Eastern princess Tino of Baghdad (DieNachte Tmo von Bagdads, 1907)—the first of Lasker-Schüler's masks—Prince Jussuf of Thebes, who later becomes associated with the biblical Joseph, King David, and others.

Nor was this mythicizing penchant restricted to her art alone. She similarly rejected the primacy of mundane reality in her relationships with her friends and fellow artists. Those in whom she recognized a certain spark she would rename—for example, King Giselheer (Gottfried Benn), the Blue Rider (Franz Marc), Saint Peter (Peter Hille), the Prince of Prague (Franz Werfel), the Cardinal or Dalai Lama (Karl Kraus). For the poet, these persons were possessed of a special nobility; they represented for her an aristocracy of the spirit which set them apart from most people.

One of these "elect" was George Levin, an art critic and composer several years younger than herself, whom Else Lasker-Schüler married in 1901. As Herwarth Walden, a name bestowed upon him by the poet, he became well known as one of the leading promoters and theoreticians of the German Expressionist movement. In 1904 in Berlin, he founded the art society "Verein fur Kunst" and in 1910 started publishing Der Sturm, which soon became a major Expressionist journal. Lasker-Schüler's poems began to appear in Der Sturm (a name she also provided) as well as in such other important journals of the time as Die Aktion and Die Fackel. After 1911, however, her poems appeared less frequently in Walden's journal. One reason given for this was that her originality and strong will could not tolerate the programmed Expressionist art which Walden was promoting; the second was that in 1911 the marriage between Else Lasker-Schüler and Herwarth Walden came to an end.

With the dissolution of this second marriage, Lasker-Schuler's life became even more unstable. Never again was she to have a permanent home or financial security. She moved from furnished rooms to cellars, but wherever she was, she surrounded herself with playthings, dolls, stuffed animals, and knickknacks. Most of her days and nights were spent at the same Berlin caf6 which she described as "our nocturnal home … our oasis, our gypsy caravan, our tent in which we can rest after the painful battles of the day."

It was in this Berlin cafe atmosphere that Lasker-Schüler wrote the poems which were to comprise her Expressionist volume, My Wonder (Meine Wunder), published in 1911. In these seemingly dialogical poems, the heart's cry—the poet's confessions of ecstasy as well as raw pain—is powerfully intoned in a charged collage of end-stopped couplets. The "new freedom of association," the disengagement of the image from a mimetic grounding in external reality, characteristic of so much Expressionist art, is evident in My Wonder. The striking color symbolism found in many of the Expressionist artists was but a logical extension of this liberation. Like many of her fellow artists, Lasker-Schüler experienced the world in particular colors and translated that experience into her poetry. The most frequently encountered and possibly the most important color in Lasker-Schuler's palette is blue, the color which for her expresses all that is pure and god-like in the thoughts and feelings of mankind. Although Lasker-Schuler did adopt such Expressionist techniques—and she has frequently been categorized as an Expressionist poet—she did so primarily because she found in Expressionism a congenial reflection of her own particular imagination where limitations of time, space, and logic found little place.

It was also in the Berlin cafes that Lasker-Schüler became intimately acquainted with many of the great Expressionist artists of the period: Georg Trakl, who dedicated some of his most beautiful poems to her as did Gottfried Benn, with whom she had a tempestuous love affair; Franz Marc; Karl Kraus; Oscar Kokoschka; George Grosz; Franz Werfel; and others. Many of the poems in My Wonder are about, or are dedicated to, these and other artists.…

Many of the poet's earlier concerns and images recur in [My Blue Piano, her last volume of poetry], but with a density and, frequently, a calm largely absent in her early writings. The images of petrifaction and decay, which earlier had been associated with the quality of human responses, return in some of the last poems, but with a difference. In both "My Blue Piano" ("Mein blaues Klavier") and "Over Glistening Gravel" ("Cher glitzernden Kies"), there occurs the new realization that there is something in the texture of the universe that is now out of tune with pristine harmony. "Over Glistening Gravel" speaks of the "downfall of the world" and of the consequent freeze and death that have stilled "all songs of love." Reminiscent of a Blakean song of experience, Lasker-Schüler's famous poem "My Blue Piano" similarly laments the loss of melody "since the world's decay." Heinz Politzer has called this the plaint of Orpheus [in "The Blue Piano of Else Lasker-Schuler, Commentary, 1950], and he is surely correct when he sees Lasker-Schüler as enriching the plaint with the desolate realization that even song had become estranged from herself:

At home I have a blue piano
But have no note to play.

It stands in the shadow of the cellar door,
There since the world's decay.

In the poem "Jerusalem," the stony landscape of the holy city becomes a fitting counter for a larger spiritual paralysis indistinguishable from the poet's own inertia. Characteristically, it is only a meeting with the "you"—the ardently sought-after Other—that can bring both the poet and Jerusalem back to life again. Even though only part of a conditional wish fulfillment ("Were you to come… "), the poem ends in a present tense replete with process and promise:

We are greeted by
Living banners of the One God,
Greening hands, sowing the breath of life.

Ever more aware of the progress of death in the world around her, Else Lasker-Schüler never surrendered her visions. They had caused her much anguish in her contact with the world; they also inspired moments of ecstasy and profound calm. In "I Know" ("Ich weiss"), a poem which speaks of her approaching death, Lasker-Schuler is still able to see the world in sensuous terms, a vision which is deepened by a resonant serenity:

My breath hovers over God's river—
Softly I set my foot
On the path to my eternal home.

That note of peace, distant echo of the imagined harmonies that once sounded from her blue piano, was one of the few that Else Lasker-Schüler ever knew.…