[In the following review, Hamburger analyzes the themes of Der Untergang der Titanic (The Sinking of the Titanic) and affirms the poem as “a celebration of bare survival.”]

How intelligent can a good poet afford to be? How knowing? How tough-minded? How well-informed? There have been times in H.M. Enzensberger's writing life when these questions troubled many of his readers and critics; and not only when Enzensberger himself posed them in his essays and statements, such as his virtual renunciation and denunciation of poetry in the later 1960s. After his three early collections, published between 1957 and 1964, it seemed for a long time that he had no more use for the spontaneous, personal lyricism that had balanced his public concerns; that the polemicist had taken over from the poet, deliberately and definitively. Apart from a few new poems added to his selection of 1971, Enzensberger remained silent as a poet until Mausoleum appeared in 1975; and, however intelligent, knowing, tough-minded, well-informed and accomplished, that sequence was not distinguished by lyricism. If those thirty-seven studies in “the history of Progress” were ballads, as he called them, they were ballads that neither sang nor danced but pinned down their subjects with a laboratory-trained efficiency.

This development remains relevant to The Sinking of the Titanic, though in recent years Enzensberger has returned to more personal, even existential, preoccupations in shorter poems, and the new sequence, too, is less rigorously held down to a single purpose and manner. Behind the poetic development—or antipoetic development, some would say—lay an ideological one—from what looked like a revolutionary commitment to the “principle of hope,” though it was utopian and independent enough to put no constraint on the poet, through an arduous grappling with the facts of economic, political and technological power, to a general disillusionment with every existing social system and its expectations for the future.

One important stage in that development was Enzensberger's visit to Cuba in 1969. Not only was The Sinking of the Titanic conceived and begun there but the Cuban experiences are also worked into the broken narrative of the poem, like many other seeming interpolations, digressions, leaps in space, time and even style. Like most long or longer poems written in this century, The Sinking of the Titanic is not an epic but a clustering of diverse, almost disparate, fragments around a thematic core. The main event of the poem, the shipwreck of the Titanic in 1912, becomes a symbol and a microcosm, with extensions, parallels, repercussions on many different levels. The Titanic is also Cuba, East Berlin, West Berlin (where Enzensberger lived as the editor of a magazine not primarily literary, as a writer in almost every possible medium, for every possible medium, and as the collector of the fragments assembled into this poem), an updated version of Dante's Hell and many other places besides, including any place where any reader of the poem is likely to be. Not content with that much telescoping, Enzensberger also includes historical flashbacks to the fifteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, all to do with doubts, self-doubts, about art and the relation of art to reality. Other digressions are even more explicit in their questioning of the truthfulness and usefulness of poets and poetry. These also introduce Dante by name, though he is present in the whole poem as a prototype of what poetry can and cannot achieve.

I shall not attempt to list all the many theses and subtheses ironically advanced in the poem, usually to be challenged or contradicted by others, because it is the business of poems to do that as succinctly as possible; yet one brief quotation does seem to subsume the main message:

We are in the same boat, all of us.
But he who is poor is the first to drown.

Characteristically for Enzensberger, that assertion is supported by statistics of the passengers—first-class, second-class, steerage and crew—drowned and saved in the Titanic disaster. Much other material of that kind, including a menu, has been drawn upon. The most lyrical, i.e., songlike, canto of the thirty-three in the book—not counting the unnumbered interpolations—is the twentieth, adapted from Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative and Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Documentary collages have been one of Enzensberger's specialties in verse and prose, and they are prominent as ever here, as in the Thirteenth Canto, made up of snatches of miscellaneous hymns and popular songs. Another is the permutation of simple colloquial phrases into puzzles or tautologies, not simple at all, but devastating, as in the interpolated section “Notice of Loss.”

Yet the most impressive and reassuring parts of the sequence, poetically, are those in which Enzensberger lets himself go again a little at last, relying less on his bag of tricks—a formidable one—than on the imaginative penetration of specific experience, other people's and his own. A high-spirited, often comically cynical desperation is his peculiar contribution to the range of poetry; it becomes affirmative, if not joyful, in the concluding canto of this poem, a celebration of bare survival.

As for the other side of his gifts, his sheer accomplishment, cleverness and adroitness, one instance of it is his success in translating so intricate and ambitious a sequence into a language not his own. In earlier English versions of his own poems, he allowed himself the freedom of “imitation.” This one is a close rendering, with no loss of fluency or exuberance, and very little of the idiomatic rightness of his German original.