[In this essay, Demetz surveys the themes and subjects of Enzensberger's firsth three volumes of poetry.]

When Hans Magnus Enzensberger first published his poems he was immediately cast in the welcome role of the angry young man, but the fixed public image has tended to obfuscate the changing concerns of a highly gifted intellectual. He is more learned, cosmopolitan, and restless than any of his contemporaries; essentially unwilling to settle down in any place or way of thought, intent on radical doubt, he does not participate in collective stances for very long. …

Enzensberger, like Brecht, wants his reader to think, and it is difficult to isolate his poetry from his bitter polemics against the German mass media (including the August Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), from his translations, and his editorial projects. His three volumes of poetry, verteidigung der wölfe, 1957/in defense of the wolves; landessprache, 1960/language of the land; and blindenschrift, 1964/writing for the blind, relate chronologically and thematically to his political analyses and to the few literary essays in Einzelheiten, 1962/Details; Politik und Verbrechen, 1964/Politics and Crime; and Deutschland Deutschland unter anderem, 1967/Germany Germany inter alia, as well as to his anthology of modern poetry and his translations of William Carlos Williams (whom Enzensberger considers the patriarch of independent American writing). The first American anthology of Enzensberger's verse suggests in its title (taken from a subdivision of the German original) that Enzensberger offers poems for people who don't read poems (1968) and likes his writings to be used by those who want to transform a world that offends their sense of fairness.

In verbal strategies and thematic interests, Enzensberger's first two volumes of poetry differ somewhat from the more subdued tone and the lean economy of the third volume. In his defense of the wolves and language of the land Enzensberger demonstrates an impressive richness of linguistic techniques, stanzaic patterns, and modes of speech. These collections include aggressively ironic attacks against all power, property, and technology; luminous love poems in a soberly contemporary idiom; and a pensive, almost elegiac poem articulating his most intimate longing for an existence of pastoral happiness, quiet, and peace. In the well-known early poem, “counsel at the highest level”, he rages against the sexually impotent “makers of history,” whom he advises to jump off their jets, ironically defends the “wolves” in power against the unthinking victims who blandly watch television and have given up any thought of changing the world, identifies the greedy consumers with hooked fish, dangling from the lines of cynical fishermen in the rich societies of America, Russia, and West Berlin, and coldly condemns the dead souls who live out their sham lives in the midst of red tape, accumulated files, and rustling IBM cards. In his gathering of nonpeople congregate generals, managers, consumers, functionaries, professors, mendacious researchers, rubber merchants, and “fat widows” who, all unmoved by the German past, wallow in their commercial, technological, and military “things,” amassed to stifle life: bonds, telegrams, warships, tennis courts, checks, real estate (not on idyllic islands), cars, movies, golf, eau de cologne, barracks, department stores, and radar screens. But Enzensberger's fine sensibility is oppressed not only by industrial goods and people without memories; what he hates most is the crude force imposed upon him by the perpetual production processes of the industrial world and by media and ads that assault his eyes and ears, catching him in a net of data, sounds, commercial offers, and threatening him with the disgusting secretions of smoke, smog, soot, and foam, all anticipating the lethal radiation that some day will seep from anonymous laboratories.

To the relentless pressures of the military-industrial complex the poet (not the social critic) Enzensberger responds in a rather traditional German fashion, appealing to the quiet fortitude of animals and plants, seeking escape in the miraculous depths of the sea, and longing to merge with the elements of the earth: his “organic” refuge distinctly if paradoxically implies that he places little faith in historical progress and in definite transformations of society; his poetic utopia resides in an unchanging nature, from which all cruel struggles between strong and weak, all lethal fungi, and all poisonous growths have been carefully removed. Enzensberger likes his nature alive with rare animals that have aesthetically pleasing names (otters, seals, salmon, sables, owls, and albatrosses) and with humble, hardy plants. In many of his best poems (not all of which are included in his American anthology) he sings the glories of the white cherry blossoms which make the thunder hesitate and cause butchers to hide, fearful of “the wild yes” of innocence. He extols the lowly celery, which does not participate in the inhumanities of man; in a later volume he writes of the northern lichen that quietly survives all the vicissitudes of man. Goodness is to be found only far from people, perhaps even nowhere on the surface of the earth, and the poet eagerly follows oysters and fish into the deep or speaks as a diver who, at the bottom of the sea, finally finds happiness in solitude, in dark and undisturbed silence. Most revealingly (at least for the earlier Enzensberger), in his poem “voices of the elements”, the world, with its newspapers and daily social responsibilities (including unpaid bills), is of unmitigated evil, and happiness resides only in partaking of “the tender dialogue of the resins,” salts, and alkalines, and in sinking “into the soundless monologue” of the substances at the dark heart of being. Sometimes the angry young man flees rather far.

Enzensberger's third collection of poems, writing for the blind, stands a little apart from his previous verse. Lines and stanzaic patterns are lean, there is less self-indulgent play with mannered paradoxes and surrealist confiture (or rather, secondhand Jacques Prévert), and while some of the earlier motifs recur repeatedly, a personal record emerges of Enzensberger's attempt to withdraw to a Scandinavian hideaway of water, stone, moss, and tar (and a rustic life with his family); the intellectual tries to find his haven in remote nature, and inevitably fails. In contrast to his earlier verse, too, world and counterworld are suggested less in abstract terms ingeniously polarizing nature and technology; now people and issues have individual and particular names (there are poems about Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Marx), and the alternatives of commitment and withdrawal confront each other within the pastoral experience itself. There are the simple house, the water, and the jug (one of Rilke's blessed “things”), but there are also letters, telegrams, and the “red knob on the transistor radio” blaring news about Caribbean crises and Dow-Jones averages; there is geographical distance and yet a modern conscience filled with painful knowledge (“bouvard and pécuchet … pontius and pilate”) and, as Walter Benjamin early suggested, with reproductions of reproductions (“of images of images / of images of images of images”); gentle friends gather in the evening, alive with “light laughter and white voices,” but the poet increasingly feels that there is social irresponsibility in his semblance of bliss: “fearless therefore ignorant / quiet and therefore superfluous / serene therefore without mercy.” In “lachesis lapponica” (“lapland lot”) the pressures of conflicting demands turn the poem itself into a dialogue between the romantic admirer of northern plains and the ardent partisan of Fidel Castro, committed to political action: the two speakers, whose utterances are printed in different type, duly impress each other, but the discussion is left in ironic abeyance and there is little likelihood that either of them will totally prevail.

Enzensberger is at his best when he balances his erudition with his sense of quality and does not try to display his considerable bag of tricks in one poem alone. In his theoretical essays he almost makes himself out to be a late disciple of Edgar Allan Poe, and his aversion to any idea of inspiration, his scholarly awareness of the literary past as a constant challenge to the modern writer, and his philosophical and constructivist inclinations place him closer to Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, or Gottfried Benn than the social critic Enzensberger might wish. From the work of Brentano, Enzensberger derives for his private poetics the central idea of linguistic Entstellung (displacement), a technique that counteracts the tendency of language to ossify in clichés and mechanical turns of phrase; I am not certain how Enzensberger's Entstellung differs from the “alienation device” (priëm ostranenija) which the Russian formalists, eager to define the de-mechanization of language, discovered in futuristic poetry. Enzensberger knows how to write romantic tetrameter and to play with the inherited techniques of the surrealists, but fundamentally he wants to shock by skillful and occasionally affected combinations of incompatible elements of rhythm, vocabulary, and idiom; while carefully exploiting, rather than negating, tradition, he avoids rhyme as well as the rules of capitalization, but secures unity of the poetic texture by means of nets of alliterations, assonances, and recurrent vowel patterns (“mokka / coma / amok / NATO”). He loves oxymora that unveil the conflicts within social reality, delights in extensive series of asyndeta that link contradictions, and handles proverbs, idioms, and quotations, made slightly disreputable by microscopic changes, with devastating meticulousness. Within the individual poem he arranges with force and determination his linguistic confrontations of the most disparate technical and professional vocabularies, and many younger poets, dissatisfied with the inherited literary idiom, have followed his lead. Few, if any, try to emulate his sober, pensive, and graceful love poetry.

Enzensberger manages to combine, with wit, urbanity, and ease, a bit of Bukharin and Lord Byron. “The blacks call me white / and the whites call me black,” he says of himself; as a social critic and the editor of Kursbuch (1965-), the most intelligent publication of the radical German left, he may aspire to change the entire world, but as a poet he appears much more concerned with himself than with the perspiring masses anywhere; he despises the high and mighty but is equally disgusted by the little people he sees in the streets, toiling, colorless, docile, and ugly. In an illuminating essay Paul Noack has called Enzensberger a conservative anarchist, but I wonder whether this clever label quite covers the productive intellectual who loves cherry trees, old books, and a future universe free of oozing machines and terrifying sounds, inhabited by a select few who suit his egocentric, exacting, and fastidious tastes. Most intensely of all, Enzensberger does not want to suffocate in precast thoughts and cemented ideologies; and when Peter Weiss recently asked him to declare himself unequivocally for the underprivileged and to “sacrifice his doubts and his reservations,” Enzensberger replied sharply that he preferred his doubts to mere sentiments and had no use for views free of internal contradictions. Fortunately, Enzensberger wants a world no less open, changing, and paradoxical than his verse.