SOURCE: “Monograph,” in Hans Arp: The Poet of Dadaism, Oswald Wolff, 1969, pp. 9-65.

The obituary column of The Times for June 8th, 1966, states that M. Jean Arp had ‘long been considered one of the foremost modern sculptors, and one of the pioneers of abstract art’. This is rather like saying that Schiller had been ‘well known as an historian and friend of Goethe’, without adding that he also wrote a few poems and dramas. For Arp was more than a sculptor and painter; he was the author of a considerable body of poetry in both French and German. The first volume had been due for publication in 1905, some time before his discovery of new areas of visual art, but the manuscript mysteriously disappeared; curiously, it was to have borne a title—Ship's log—similar to his last collection—The dream-captain's log—which appeared in the year before his death.

Arp's poetry is in a state of bibliographical and editorial chaos. He frequently modified existing versions of his poems so that often new poems emerge from the old; and in addition many of the published texts are corrupt and inconsistent. The Collected Poems I, which he helped to compile, is by no means definitive, or even, in some places, accurate. In Word-dreams and black stars ‘ss’ and ‘β’ alternate quite arbitrarily, even in the middle of a poem; and in Pensive flames one of the facsimiles of the manuscript reproduced there is in disagreement with the printed text on the facing page. So many of the collections and individual poems have had a chequered career, and the confusion is not likely to be resolved until some hardy spirit undertakes a detailed variorum edition of Arp's poetry.

None the less—to make a virtue out of necessity—the very existence of different versions of many poems is in itself illuminating. It is clear that Arp did not regard the completed work as sacrosanct, an indestructible entity to be preserved intact for posterity, but rather as a temporary statement to be modified, sometimes almost beyond recognition, with the passage of time and his constantly changing evolution as a poet. Indeed this phenomenon is a reassuring implicit statement that his poetry did really develop, and that there might be some coherent set of principles underlying the frequently mystifying practice.

Critically, too, the poems pose many problems. Michael Hamburger, writing in the context of Arp's poetry as a whole, comments with considerable justification: ‘Critics—and naturally the reading public as well—hobble along after the poems, but the gap keeps on getting wider.’ So much so that some students of Arp, notably Heselhaus, withdraw into curt generalisations; others, like Liede and Döhl, satisfy themselves by describing the external characteristics of the poems and suggesting various influences and parallels in literature. The basic doubt, which lurks between every line of these studies, and which is evidently the source of much critical embarrassment, can be expressed in these terms: although it is true that much of Arp's Dadaist work has a compelling childlike magic all its own, and that the later poems confront the modern world with a mystical, quasi-religious challenge, can any of it truly be called poetry? Is it really art? And this suspicion that the ‘game’ of Arp might just be a practical joke on the reader, together with puzzlement that they are moved without being able to state why, prevents the essential step from being taken from description and comparison to analysis and evaluation. An escape clause has been provided by Usinger in a paper on Dada:

The Dadaist poem has no meaning outside its own world of words, which begins with the opening word of the poem and fades with the last, but has no link with any other world beneath or above, before or beyond it.

And Krolow, in an essay on poetry as play, concurs: for him, Arp's poetry attains ‘an autonomous imagery’.

The hobbling reading public is poorly served by a critic who states that Arp is admirable but inscrutable, particularly now when much attention has been devoted both to the definition of Dada, of which Arp could truly be termed a life-member, and also to the examination of the problems or spiritual isolation and despair confronting a multitude of contemporary artists.

But as yet there has been no sustained study of Arp's poetry which does any justice to his achievements. A comprehensive survey of the whole of his output in German alone is a task of such magnitude that this essay, while attempting a general introduction to Arp's life and work, concentrates on the collection the bird plus three and the trio of volumes published in the last six years of his life in the hope of arriving at some definition of Arp's theory and practice as a poet.

.....

Hans Arp was born in the city of Strasbourg on September 16th, 1887, some sixteen years after its annexation by Germany. The peculiar and unfortunate geographical position of Alsace-Lorraine caused Arp, whose family were French sympathisers, to learn the language of the occupying power at school; and this supposed bilingual state has given rise to the first of many misconceptions surrounding his life and work. Liede goes so far as to say:

Familiar with two languages and yet not familiar with their subtlest sounds and finest shades of meaning, Arp is able like no one else to experience every idiom, every banal turn of phrase as a small miracle, to release them from their context because they are both funny and delicious, and, like a gourmet, let them melt on his tongue. Where German alone is the mother tongue, inhibitions are far stronger; it is more difficult to shake oneself free from contexts; the result often sounds tortured, but it strikes more deeply.

Leaving aside the contradiction that a man not fully conversant with two languages should presume to write poetry in either of them, Liede's view is inaccurate on two counts: in the first place, Arp spoke, not two, but three languages, the third being Alsatian, in which his first published poem appeared in about 1902. More important than the number of languages is the issue of Arp's proficiency. Even without a personal knowledge of his linguistic abilities, it is clear from reading both his French and German poetry and prose alike that he is truly a native speaker in each language. This is particularly clear in the many poems which have both French and German versions: each are literary works in their own right, and the only sure way of discovering which came first is a close study of their chronology. However, it is not necessary to lean on internal evidence alone, for Marcel Jean put this very question to Arp:

When I asked him which of the three languages he was most familiar with, he told me: ‘But they are all the same. I grew up in these three idioms, and I make use of them according to circumstances.’ And it is true that one never catches him using German words during a conversation in French, and vice versa, as could happen, by oversight or force of circumstances, if these had been consciously learnt languages.

So, instead of limiting him, this triple allegiance afforded him possibilities of expression both as man and poet rarely experienced before.

Throughout his life Arp wrote in both French and German; there have been no periods where one lay fallow and the other dominated. And the same holds true for the other supposed ‘split’ within him, namely that between poetry and the visual arts. These two have likewise always been complementary; perhaps it is because his sculptures and paintings have gained swift recognition, while the poems have mostly been regarded as obscure and secondary, that they have suffered undue neglect. Arp himself has emphasised the interplay between ear and eye in the many line-drawings that illustrate his volumes of verse; and not illustrate merely in the sense of giving the reader something else to look at as well as pages of print. Particularly in some of the post-war collections, the drawings comment directly on the content of the poems. But, as with the languages, the visual and written are kept strictly apart; each stands on its own without the other. The illustrations are not masking a deficiency in the poetry, nor are the poems just keys to picture-riddles.

In both linguistic and artistic spheres, Strasbourg, straddling as it does the supposedly mutually exclusive romanic and germanic segments of Europe, played a major part in furthering the richness of Arp's experience which he transformed into art; and this he acknowledged by passing most of his days either in a bilingual territory like Weggis in Switzerland, or commuting between Meudon and Solduno. In Strasbourg, the blue line of the Vosges mountains opened his eyes to the wonders of nature; its cathedral stimulated his vocation as a sculptor; looking to the west, Paris drew him as the focal point of modern art; and to the east, he was inspired by the poetry of the German Romantics, in particular that of Brentano and Novalis, with its elements of fairy-tale, magic and mysticism.

Even as a young child Arp was fascinated and absorbed by the mysterious realms of art, and it is significant that he himself has stressed the importance of the dream as the proper concern of artistic activity, a belief which remained with him all his life. In spite of changes of style and shifts in emphasis in his work, this preoccupation followed him from his earliest days to the very last published volume.

Here, in conversation with George Morris in 1956, Arp traces in his own words the beginnings of this life-long total commitment to the dream and art:

I remember that, as a boy of eight, I drew passionately in a large book that looked like an account-book. I used coloured pencils. No other trade, no other profession interested me, and these childish games—the exploration of the unknown territories of dreams—were already proclaiming that my vocation was to discover the unknown lands of art. It was probably the statues of the cathedral in Strasbourg, my native city, that inspired me to take up sculpture. When I was about ten I carved two little figures in wood, Adam and Eve, which my father later had inlaid on a box. When I was sixteen my parents gave me permission to leave the grammar school in Strasbourg to begin drawing and painting at the College of Art and Commerce. … So in 1904, in spite of my pleas to be allowed to go to Paris, my father, considering me to be too young and fearing for me among the ‘sirens’ of the metropolis, compelled me to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar.

In Weimar modern painting made its initial impact on him, but it was to be some time yet before he succeeded in developing and perfecting a revolutionary modernism of his own.

The poems of these early years are disappointing. This example, bearing the date 1903, appears in the Collected Poems I:

IM WALD
                    Im Wald! Im Wald!
                    Wo die groβen grünen Bäume rauschen
                    ewig rauschen.
                    Die groβen grünen Bäume.
                    Das goldgrün' Haargelock
                    worin das Sonnenlicht blitzt
                    das hängt voller Träume.
                    Schüttle Dich Grüner schüttle Dich
                    So!
                    Schon sinken Träume
                    wie schwerer roter Wein
                    in mich.

(1)

The poem of which this is an extract (entitled ‘Spring’ and some forty lines in length) is a hyperbolic and naïve evocation of woodland as a place of escape, spiritual refreshment, and particularly as an asylum for indulgence in dreams and the infinite ramblings of the imagination. ‘In the wood’ takes the last dozen lines; there the golden sun and the rustling green leaves, for ever holding some mysterious discourse among themselves, hang heavy with dreams, which, shaken by the breeze, fall upon the somnolent poet and induce a state of semi-consciousness and heightened awareness similar in effect to the workings of alcohol.

It is a derivative, almost plagiaristic poem, with hardly a trace of a personal style. Liede and Döhl have demonstrated how easy it is to draw up a large number of comparisons between Arp and his contemporaries and predecessors, amassing an imposing list including such unlikely bedfellows as Heine and Morgenstern, Scheerbart and Brentano, Mombert and Mörike. But such a procedure is singularly unhelpful, for Arp is simply ‘quoting’—much as a composer does musical themes—a whole range of poetic and non-poetic forms and language, from the daily paper to the Bible, with the sole motive of exploiting to the full all manner of experiences in order to give expression to his own individual feelings and emotions. And at this early stage he is writing very much in a traditional and conventional mode which derives from a whole host of antecedents.

I read medieval chronicles, chapbooks, folksongs; I read Des Knaben Wunderhorn with particular entrancement. … I loved popular and student songs. Children's poems and drawings exercised a great influence on me. They aroused in me similar worlds of the imagination.

All these are little more than a stimulant, a means towards an end. But more than that: it is evident too that his interests lie on a different plane from those of his sources:

Even at that time the word worked its spell upon me. I filled page after page with unusual compound words and formed impossible verbs from nouns. I twisted well-known verses round and declaimed them with passion and high spirits unceasingly, on and on as if I'd never stop: Stars star many a star, so that stars star, wood wood many a wood, so that woods wood, zag zag many a zag, so that zags zag. Misusing the foundations of language often wrought terrible vengeance on me, and the same happened to me as to the sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's poem.

To some extent this fascination with words and their magical—and sometimes black magical—powers has caught him already in ‘Spring’:

Wo tief, tief unter der braunen Walderde
Die Waldquellen, Waldbäche, Waldflüsse,
          Waldströme
Rinnen, springen, flieβen, schieβen
Hin zu dem groβen Meer.

‘Where deep, deep beneath the brown woodland earth / The wood-springs, wood-brooks, wood-rivers, wood-torrents / Trickle, leap, flow, flood / Down to the mighty sea.’ But it is all very subservient to the meaning, here the idea of small tricklings of the imagination gathering size and momentum like the course of a river, finally surging forth into the infinite seas. Any experimentation with language is here at a very simple and tentative stage, if indeed it exists at all.

The magic comes in another guise too, in the line ‘Shake, Green One shake’, an echo of Grimms’ Cinderella:

Shiver and quiver, little tree,
Silver and gold throw over me.

But this childlike faith in the incantatory power of words and the sense of wonder in the natural world are marred and blunted by the ponderously literary last three lines of the poem.

Indeed the keynote of ‘In the wood’ is uncertainty of style, the absence of a sense of direction and lack of confidence in the medium. The poem is patchy, and does not fuse into a satisfactory whole. There are too many secondhand ideas and borrowed forms. The ‘quotations’ remain quotations, and the poem has nothing new to say.

Throughout the dominant mood is that of the eternal carefree Romantic youth in a bucolic paradise where the sun always shines, where the frenzied activity of urban existence is remote and forgotten, and life is one long indolent daydream. The language too harks back to Romanticism, with the Spring, woodland, infinity, the dream, and so forth. There are occasional darker colours too, in the fearful flight from the harsh sunlight into the cool wood at the beginning of ‘Spring’; and also, at the end of ‘In the wood’, a more adult and reflective insight. But each of these elements tears the poem apart and makes it more like a repository for discarded lines from other poets than a work in its own right.

Hardly anything in these early poems bears the promise of the sudden change and flowering of Arp's poetry in the 1910s. The only sure observation that can be made is that, in the three ‘Fairytales’ (2), as well as in ‘In the wood’, Arp is trying to put new wine into old bottles; there is some indication that he is seeking to convey original and individual ideas, but his medium—old, played-out words, forms, and modes of expression—constantly prevents them from getting off the ground. Form and content clash instead of, as is the intention, fusing together. The result is flat and pedestrian.

Only once or twice is there a flash of light, as in this strange compound:

Er zog sein schwarzes Kleid an
und seine Flammenhalsbinde

(3)

but the effect is puzzling rather than felicitous. It draws attention away from the main intent of the poem, rather than contributing towards its total impact.

This poem was published with two thematically similar poems in a periodical edited by Schickele, where a footnote announced that they would form part of the Ship's log. It can be assumed, then, that it is representative of the collection.

Arp introduced the three poems as follows:

This is my ship's log, the diary of my great voyage into the golden land. In it I wrote down my battles with the stars, the storms, and the waters—O my friends, what a boaster I am! You are sure to believe it was I who did battle against the storms that churned up the sea, that sank all other ships. You are sure to say: ‘How many dangers threatened him.’ O I have to laugh. I wrote down every wave and every little fish. But forgive me. I went down to the sea as a dreamer. And behind every wave that lapped smilingly against my ship, and behind every wind that singingly bellowed my red sails, I the dreamer sensed danger.

The disparity between thought and execution, theory and practice, is the reason for the essential failure of the early poems. Arp writes of the immense power of the imagination, and the extreme perils of his voyage into the unknown. But the poems themselves are limp and inadequate beside the aspirations of their creator. What is clear, however, is that despite their failings, they were not composed tongue in cheek, but in deadly earnest. And it is important to recognise this, not only in relation to these few poems, but also to his subsequent work.

If these first attempts at artistic expression appear trite and conventional in retrospect, at the time they represented to Arp the opening rounds in his battle for a new art form. Later he too was to confess that the loss of the manuscript of which they formed part was a blessing in disguise.

In 1904, in the course of a short visit to relatives in Paris, Arp came for the first time into close contact with modern painting. In the next three years he pursued his artistic studies, first in Weimar, then later in Paris itself. He became increasingly restless with the traditional methods and attitudes of his teachers, indicating his own dissatisfaction with the old art forms:

Time and again, both in the Academy in Weimar as well as in Paris, it seemed to be the task of the teachers to spoil the seen and unseen world for the pupil. Time and again they wanted to make me copy and imitate. But I did not let myself be confused and led astray, and in 1915 I succeeded in creating my first significant picture. I feel now that at the time I was like a child playing with a box of bricks. Out of this play and from building with basic shapes grew my ‘first successful picture’.

In 1908 Arp moved to Weggis in Switzerland, there to spend the next couple of years in solitude, struggling to throw off the conventional forms of art and to arrive at a new direct contact with the natural world. His description of this time in ‘Alone at the foot of the Rigi’ (4) leaves no doubt of his complete dedication to art, his utter seriousness in seeking its rejuvenation. In spite of his own discontent with what he was doing and the lack of understanding his efforts received, he persevered until he arrived at his new goal, which he termed ‘concrete art’. Its purpose he defines as follows:

We do not want to imitate nature. We do not want to recreate, we want to create. We want to create as the plant creates its fruit, and not recreate. We want to create, not indirectly, but directly.

As there is no trace of abstraction to be seen in this kind of art, we call it concrete art.

The works of concrete art should not bear the signature of the man who composed them. These paintings, these sculptured works—these objects—should, in the great studio of nature, be anonymous like clouds, mountains, animals, men. Yes—even men should merge themselves into nature.

(6)

So the forms of art should follow those of its subject, nature; and art should play the same kind of creative rôle.

In Switzerland Arp met several important painters: this led to the formation, in about 1910, of the Moderner Bund, which, in its first exhibition in Lucerne in 1911, exhibited works by many artists, including Matisse, Picasso, and Arp himself.

Having now found his artistic feet, so to speak, Arp became increasingly involved with the leading movements and personalities of the time. In 1912 he went to Berlin, where he made the acquaintance of Kandinsky and came into contact with the Blauer Reiter group. Two works which he wrote about this time, which appeared in the periodical Der Sturm, ‘Concerning the most recent painting’ and ‘From drawings in Kokoschka's sketch-book’ (5), mark the first real stage in his development as a poet.

The ‘Kokoschka's sketch-book’ is a hybrid of prose poem and heightened prose, and first appeared in the Expressionist periodical Der Sturm in 1913; it is reprinted, together with a later extended version under the title ‘Wintergarden’, in Collected Poems I, where it is prefaced by an explanatory comment from Arp, in the course of which he says:

My text in Der Sturm contains errors and interpolations, which are none of my making. But these interpolations spurred me on to expand my text by more interpolations. I have however made no changes to the original order of the words and sentences.

Döhl, in the only detailed study of this work, takes his utterance at face value, and having stated that the word is the maximum unit of meaning comes to the conclusion that

the poem is held together by a web of meaning determined by associations, which is in itself meaningless. And perhaps one could even say that a text like the one before us no longer contains a statement capable of interpretation, that it does not attempt to reflect reality, that instead it offers its own reality, a textual reality.

But this view hardly corresponds to the evidence of the text, particularly in the light of the later, expanded version.

The poem is unique in Arp's work in that it grew directly in and around a specific experience. During the performance at the famous Berlin cabaret, the Wintergarden, where his friend the artist Kokoschka was also present sketching the proceedings, Arp wrote down sentences containing his impression of the scene, and these became ‘From drawings in Kokoschka's sketch-book’.

This poem is complicated by its dual perspective; for Arp is portraying not only the superficial level of reality as represented by the performers and audience, but also the underlying layers which Kokoschka was peculiarly adept at revealing. And ‘Wintergarden’ adds a third perspective, that of Arp's comments from many years later on the total significance of what took place in the Wintergarden.

As for the charge that the poem is based on the word and totally out of touch with reality, it is clear that both language and style are quite ‘normal’ for the period, and, although there are signs that Arp is beginning to develop his own idiom, the only unmistakably Arpian touches are to be found, not unnaturally, in the later ‘Wintergarden’ version.

The first paragraph of the poem (paragraph numbering is based on the second version), identical in both versions, describes the general setting: heaven and earth have shrunk to the unreal, artificial dimensions of a variety theatre; the stars are electric lights, the branches are the arms of candelabra. In this narrow world Mr. Archie A. Goodale, apparently a performer on the trapeze, hangs upside down like an artificial bunch of grapes. The emphasis is on escape from the real world outside, on indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh.

The second paragraph in the ‘Kokoschka's sketch-book’ is cryptic to say the least, but in ‘Wintergarden’ it is expanded considerably; not arbitrarily, but in order to clarify. The lady singer is introduced partly to create a sense of progression: this unnamed nightingale is the next act after Mr. Goodale, and she makes up in volume for what she lacks in talent. Also her presence creates a sharper comment on the situation; for her singing seeks to drown horrors that lurk beneath the surface glitter and ballyhoo of the theatre. The audience are whipped to a frenzy by her performance, and she conspires to drive them on to the ultimate of pleasure, oblivious of the harsh facts of the world outside.

The third paragraph makes fair sense in the first version, and only one of the ‘Wintergarden’ additions is of great significance. In it, Arp shifts his attention from the stage and comments on the figure of Kokoschka sketching the performance, immediately picking out the latter's key quality as an artist: his ability to see through ‘the transparent skin of man’. Alone of those present, Kokoschka is able to penetrate beneath the surface and reveal the dormant horror beneath. And Arp's significant addition—‘the horror at the sight of any living body that grips the observer’—underlines this threat of the canker within, and he stresses the need for a highly simplified and stylised portrait in order to break through the externals and grasp the essence of man beneath.

The fourth paragraph, unchanged in ‘Wintergarden’, moves outward to explore the audience in the light of this newly-won insight, and a sorry collection of decadent, empty, over-dressed creatures they are, their now transparent outer covering clearly revealing the corruption within.

The fifth paragraph—the lady singer, it seems, is still holding forth—is greatly expanded in ‘Wintergarden’. The smoke rising from the pipes of the audience becomes the eternal alternation of human joy and suffering; the drinks before them become the dream, the suspension of reality in the theatre, and reflect the recurrent human failing of ignoring the unpleasant facts of life. ‘Wintergarden’ pointedly adds that the rude awakening will not be long delayed. The paragraph ends in Expressionist fashion with the dark erotic urges throbbing in the gloom of the boxes and the agonising screams of the women in labour. It is all too easy to dismiss this as a typical piece of arbitrary Arpian nonsense, but in fact it is another clear warning: you may indulge in your pleasures tonight, but the consequences of your attempted flight from reality will be both terrible and inevitable.

In the next paragraph, the trapezes, still rocking gently to and fro after Mr. Goodale, become—now that Arp has Kokoschka's gift of ‘the eye of God’—the first flashes of lightning heralding the storm that is soon to break, and the middle of the paragraph, a ‘Wintergarden’ addition, warns of the transience of the performance, of pleasures selfishly and unthinkingly grasped at. The acerbity of this retrospective comment is heightened by the flowers in the auditorium and the German housewives on their evening out gasping at the lion tamer wrestling with his splendid beasts. But the battle will soon be a real one and then their cries will be of a different order.

The seventh paragraph acidly denounces the hypocrisy of man adulating the blooming crucifixes before the altar of variety theatre, of false delights, and in a superb Arpian image, added later, states that, spiritually at least, man is dead already: ‘A heart expires on a brazen mouth. It breathes, trickles and hardens into silver threads.’ And in the background Kokoschka is capturing all this on paper, a man who is concerned with ‘such trifles as suns and stars’.

The penultimate paragraph is an intricate tracery of the three perspectives of the poem: the audience appear in the subsequently expanded section as frivolous salon figures; Kokoschka sees through them with all the vigour and acute observation of Constantin Guys, the French observer of the nineteenth-century Paris scene, and the performance on stage—a masked Indian dance, it appears—parallels the necessity for the mystical qualities of the Orient to penetrate the insensate skulls of the Berlin audience who see no more than the surface glitter.

The poem ends with a paragraph unchanged in ‘Wintergarden’. The first, central and final paragraphs, then, remain unaltered, indicating some sense of order and meaningfulness even in the ‘Kokoschka's sketch-book’. It dies away in bemusement at the lost potential of man, at the picturesque-grotesque scene before the poet, at the way in which man's natural gifts have become stilled and stifled.

The differences between the ‘Kokoschka's sketch-book’ and ‘Wintergarden’ versions are illuminating: in the first, Arp was able to see through the transparent skin of man only at second hand. His insight is there, but only dimly realised. The broader vision of ‘Wintergarden’ brings the obscurer passages into focus. The ‘Kokoschka's sketch-book’ darkly perceives the dangers threatening the comfort-loving, pleasure-seeking Berliners in the immediate pre-war years, and ‘Wintergarden’ recognises these dangers, and the reasons for which they have arisen, more acutely. Like other poems of this type and period, it is wide open to the threat of being termed prophetic; yet the dangers are not specifically those of impending World War, but rather the intuitive feeling that inevitable disaster will attend what a contemporary critic, Diebold, calls ‘the age of the machine, the age without a heart-beat’.

Döhl repeatedly insists that Arp is trying to shake off the shackles of Romanticism, but here at least, if Arp is trying to free himself from any influence at all, passages like ‘metamorphoses of women and plants’ suggest that it is not Romanticism, but Jugendstil. And in his ruthless unmasking of the vanity of society and his search for the ‘idea’ behind the reality, the essence of things, conveyed in this stylised mode of writing, which is at one and the same time compressed and expansive, one could surely speak of the ‘Kokoschka's sketch-book’ as being a representative of Arp's Expressionist period.

In 1914 came the outbreak of the First World War, and the story has it that Arp caught the very last train out to Paris. Max Ernst, whom he met in that year, attributes a symbolic significance to Arp's journey to France: ‘The legend goes that the train crossed the frontier at the very moment at which it was being closed, and moreover right under the compartment in which Arp was sitting, hence his divided personality.’ In Paris he came to know many more important artists of the time—Eggeling, Jacob, Picasso, Apollinaire, Modigliani—but a lack of funds drove him to return to Switzerland. There the German consular authorities took an official interest in him; they wanted him to return to Germany and become a soldier. Arp did not greet this suggestion with any enthusiasm, and having forewarned them that he was mentally unstable, went to the consulate in Zurich, where he duly impressed the officials that he was non compos mentis by making the sign of the cross in front of Hindenburg's portrait, and, when asked his date of birth, by writing on a pillar ‘September 16th 1887 several times, drawing a line underneath, and adding up the figures to arrive at a fantastically large total. Thus Arp demonstrated his scorn for bureaucracy and the national pride that causes wars, and convinced the authorities that his enlistment would do more to advance the enemy's war effort than that of the German side. He was regarded as a madman and exempted from military service.

Now he was free to continue his work as an artist. In an exhibition at the Tanner gallery in November 1915, in which he and others were continuing their search for a new art through the use of novel materials, he met Sophie Taeuber, with whom he collaborated, and whom he later married in 1922. At the beginning of 1916 he received an invitation from Hugo Ball to work with him in the Cabaret Voltaire; and from that time dates his involvement with Dada.

Dada had crystallised into a movement, or rather anti-movement, for a variety of reasons. The first was the war, which spelt out the bankruptcy of Western civilisation. The machine-monster was devouring itself in frustrated rage. And then there were the refugees from the war who gathered, by a variety of devious routes, in Zurich, a city which has often been called the quiet centre of the European storm, and which offered ideal shelter to those who could no longer endure the world outside. It was free, neutral and cosmopolitan. So many people of different nationalities and all shades of political opinion invaded Zurich (Lenin lived only a stone's throw from the focal point of Dada) that a local paper produced a cartoon depicting a crowd staring at an unfortunate and evidently embarrassed individual. The caption runs: ‘Do you see that fellow over there everyone's staring at? He must be one of the natives.’

The artists who appeared in Zurich formed various groups, but it was not until Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire early in 1916 that a successful and significant movement reflecting the artistic temper of the time emerged. Why Cabaret? Because such was the diversity of talent (painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, musicians, etc.) and nationalities (French, German, Rumanian, etc.) that this was the only possible means of bringing them all together in a way which would have an immediate and direct impact upon the local population and emigré intellectuals. Why Voltaire? Ball chose the name deliberately as a social protest. Like Huelsenbeck and Tzara, two other leading lights of Dada, Ball was strongly antibourgeois, and wanted above all to give vent to his wrath at the way a middle-class society was threatening to destroy the world.

Arp was one of the early members of the Cabaret, but, in the words of Richter, he was not so much concerned with shocking the bourgeois as

primarily pure pleasure, the satisfaction of his sense of fun. The fortissimo of Tzara and Huelsenbeck would largely have drowned the soft flute-tones of the Alsatian painter, if he had not, by the magic of his strange personality and the childlike charm and wisdom of his poems, found himself a place during one of their pauses for breath.

Arp was interested more in creating than destroying, and at least as far as literature is concerned, his is the only really enduring contribution to Dada.

The Cabaret Voltaire was an astounding success, with its wild performances, art exhibitions and recitals, and Dada soon spread to places as far apart as Hanover and New York, Paris and Barcelona. As an artistic phenomenon it has long been shrouded in misconceptions. Before it became respectable material for the literary critic it was regarded as a sub-art form, an embarrassing aberration. Now it is largely accepted as ‘art’, and our galleries are full of exhibitions by Delaunay, Picabia, Duchamp and the rest; but it is still too frequently regarded as nonsense pure and simple, and as such beyond the range of the detecting and interpreting devices of the critic.

There is no doubt that the Dadaists took themselves seriously. Perhaps it is a puritan strain in human nature that finds it difficult to accept that play and seriousness, fun and art, can go together. Arp himself has long recognised this puzzlement, and in an essay entitled ‘Dada was no childish romp’ seeks to clarify the position:

Those who only describe the farcical and fantastical side of Dada and do not penetrate into its heart, its transcendent reality, offer only a worthless fragment.

(7)

Misunderstanding is the lot of the artist at odds with the world; and misunderstanding has certainly pursued the most important of Arp's collections of poetry in the Dadaist vein, the bird plus three. (8-19)

.....

Reading the bird plus three is not unlike eaves-dropping on a conversation in pidgin English. The interlocutors seem to make mutual sense, and clearly achieve a satisfactory degree of communication. The language sounds familiar, but only half-phrases and the occasional word grant us some kind of insight into what might be being said. There is also the sneaking suspicion that the dialogue could conceivably be some elaborate hoax specially mounted for our benefit.

Because Arp finds the universe meaningless, he withdraws into his own private world, to escape, possibly also to find a new meaning elsewhere. Does he succeed in communicating this, if indeed he is trying to do so? Is he wilfully cutting himself off, or is the reader simply unfamiliar with his methods?

There are sixteen poems in the revised version of the bird plus three. None of them rhyme, nor is there any attempt at a consistent metre. But there is a common pattern, in that each of the lines of ‘verse’, which are all end stop lines, consists of one or more complete sentences. If one counts the number of words per line in, say, ‘the noblewoman’ (13), a further pattern emerges: 11, 8, 6, 9, 10, 12, 28; that is, a sequence of short lines finishing up with a much longer one which, in turn, if broken up into its basic units, repeats this pattern within itself: 6, 9, 13. With some variations nine of the poems are true to this mode; the others either show rudimentary signs of it, or are just a sequence of short lines.

The individual lines also have quite a lot in common. First, with two minor exceptions, they are, as far as grammar and syntax are concerned, beyond reproach, and both style and language are plain and colloquial. Most of the sentences tend to begin in a fairly normal manner, but the second half seems to render the whole sentence ridiculous. It is like a game of consequences that has gone badly wrong. Arp, it appears, is taking normal objects and situations, and deliberately putting them into unfamiliar contexts or making them go through impossible contortions. The apparent effect is the breaking up of the poems into self-contained lines, each of which is a nonsensical statement. But there are links of a kind within and between sentences, although they could hardly be called orthodox. Often it is a sound or a word in the first half of a sentence that seems to generate the second (as in ‘die krallen halten die glashanteln’), or one word stimulates a whole list of similar words (‘im januar … im februar … im märz’). Occasionally a really startling link occurs, as in ‘wer dreht die kaffeemühle. wer lockt das idyllische reh’, where one word comes out of another, like ‘behind’ producing ‘hind’. Arp, then, in these bridges within and between lines, is allowing chance relationships to determine what comes next, and to lead him on to the end of the poem. ‘Chance’, of course, falls within the framework of his own preoccupations, and is not a wholly arbitrary force. Perhaps, as these bridges are detectable in many cases, they are present throughout the poems, but some, if they are there, are so concealed that they are beyond detection.

The universe is absurd, and so Arp rips it to pieces by destroying logic and allowing chance to bring words together, bonded by bridges. His intention is the creation of a new synthesis. Now in the visual arts he later did exactly the same kind of thing with pieces of paper, the papiers déchirés, tearing them up and letting them fall in order to see what happened. So one might call these poems poèmes déchirés, experiments in reshaping the world as experienced through language.

‘The noblewoman’ (13) serves as a good illustration of this procedure: it opens with a series of contradictions. A noblewoman pumps clouds into stone and leather sacks, suffocating living things in inanimate containers. The next line pursues this juxtaposition of live and dead, as giant cranes wind larks into the sky, reducing them to mere puppets trilling in the heavens. Clouds are being put away, larks are being wound away; the earth is being emptied, it seems. At ground level too sand-towers are choked with lifeless dolls. The running water is blocked by a collection of objects, all round in shape, all discarded: the wheels of life have ground to a halt. Or, recalling other poems, the stars, like rotten fruit, have fallen from the sky. The ships, with their fairytale names, sail on regardless. The dragon (which in German could have become a mere kite on a string) is bereft of its past powers, and reduced to the undignified status of the family dog. And in the final long sentence, magical powers have been lost by the temporal and spiritual: the towns are rooted to the spot, the church-towers can move only in their cellars; therefore, the poem mournfully concludes, we are no longer obliged to clean the claws (which refers to the larks and dragons), horns (of the ammonites), or weather-vanes (of the sand-towers, ships, church-towers). Now that the magic has gone from the world and the insanity of science and reason has taken over, we no longer feel any bonds with, or sense of responsibility for, what is going on around us. The true life is a dead past.

So this experiment of putting together things which totally contradict one another, bridged by all manner of arbitrary associations, is a success here, and for this reason the last long line has been appended to draw the scattered threads together. A new order has grown out of a deliberately created chaos, a coherent statement from an apparently inchoate morass of words.

In general terms, then, those poems in the collection which consist only of a series of short lines reflect only the chaos; those which terminate in a long line are the ones in which Arp has seen some order in the chaos, and, in that long line, conclusions are made regarding his insight.

The one poem in the bird plus three which conforms most closely to the model pattern, and which expresses most clearly, not only what life is like now, but why it has become so, is ‘kaspar is dead’ (8, 9). The following is the last version Arp wrote:

          weh unser guter kaspar ist tot.
          wer verbirgt nun die brennende fahne im
wolkenzopf und schlägt täglich ein schwarzes
          schnippchen.
          wer dreht nun die kaffeemühle im urfaβ.
          wer lockt nun das idyllische reh aus der ver-
steinerten tüte.
          wer schneuzt nun die schiffe parapluies wind-
euter bienenväter ozonspindeln und entgrätet die
pyramiden.
          weh weh weh unser guter kaspar ist tot. heiliger
bimbam kaspar ist tot.
          die heufische klappern herzzerreiβend vor leid
in den glockenscheunen wenn man seinen vor-
namen ausspricht. darum seufze ich weiter seinen
familiennamen kaspar kaspar kaspar.
          warum hast du uns verlassen. in welche gestalt
ist nun deine schöne groβe seele gewandert. bist du
ein stern geworden oder ein euter aus schwarzem
licht oder ein durchsichtiger ziegel an der stöhn-
enden trommel des felsigen wesens.
          jetzt vertrocknen unsere scheitel und sohlen und
die feen liegen halbverkohlt auf dem scheiter-
haufen.
          jetzt donnert hinter der sonne die schwarze
kegelbahn und keiner zieht mehr die kompasse
und die räder der schiebkarren auf.
          wer iβt nun mit der phosphoreszierenden ratte
am einsamen barfüβigen tisch.
          wer verjagt nun den schirokkokoteufel wenn er
die pferde verführen will.
          wer erklärt uns nun die monogramme in den
sternen.
          seine büste wird die kamine aller wahrhaft edlen
menschen zieren doch das ist kein trost und
schnupftabak für einen totenkopf.

(9)

This poem appears in several versions: the earliest dates from 1919 and is set out in prose with no punctuation. A year later it came out under the intriguing title ‘Swallows balls’ (Hode, testicle, being a pun on the obsolescence of the Ode as a poetic form), as the first two of five stanzas of that poem. The rest of the stanzas are made up from four other poems from the bird plus three. Not only does the layout change from one version to another, but also the content is considerably expanded in versions after 1920.

All this prompts the same question that could be put regarding the ‘Kokoschka's sketch-book’ and ‘Wintergarden’, but in this more acute form: how is it possible to attempt a serious interpretation of a poem that not only undergoes arbitrary alterations, but also loses its independence as a poem at one stage in its life? The simple answer is that it is not possible if Arp consistently viewed his poetry as word-collages to be rebuilt at will. This is, however, far from the truth.

The earliest prose version of ‘kaspar is dead’ is little more than a string of loosely related statements. By subsequently writing it out in verse form, Arp recognises that the chance constellation of ideas has at least a formal pattern, and by modifying it further he exploits the meaningfulness of the originally spontaneous poem thus revealed. So it develops from obscurity to clarity in much the same way as the ‘Kokoschka's sketch-book’. As ‘kaspar is dead’ progresses, so it comes to mirror more closely the structural pattern described above. The first verse version hardly follows the pattern at all, but the last is almost a paradigm. (The sentence-lengths are as follows; the culminating long sentences being italicised, their internal structure following in brackets: 6, 14, 7, 10, 13, 13, 23 (14, 9); 46 (5. 10, 31); 14, 20; 11, 11, 9, 20 (10, 10).) As Arp devoted so much attention to this poem, it seems likely that its content held something of the greatest importance for him.

The poems opens with a statement of bereavement. Kaspar, whoever he might be, appears to have died, and the first section of the poem is a series of rhetorical questions each beginning ‘who … now’, which lament that certain things are no longer possible now that Kaspar is gone. He was able to hide the burning banner behind a tress of clouds, to cut out the sun for an instant in order to play a practical joke. This suggests wit, humour, and intimacy with the forces of nature. He was able to turn the coffee-mill in the primeval barrel, to relate everyday life to the cosmic order. He was able too to entice the idyllic deer from the petrified paper-bag, to ferret out the hidden forces of nature from the straitjacket of civilisation. Formerly deer came spontaneously out of the forests, but now the latter have been reduced to pulp for paper-bags and their fauna destroyed in the process. Contemporary society is inhuman; the deer represents the timid, delicate essence of true humanity. Kaspar alone was capable of restoring the link between man and nature, of making the universe meaningful, as the last line of the section states: ‘who will now fillet the pyramids.’ Who will now unlock the age-old mysteries of life, and bring back the fruitful past?

After a moment of renewed despair, in which he mocks those who weep crocodile tears for Kaspar, Arp asks himself where Kaspar is now. Perhaps he has become a star, has returned to heaven; or a water-chain, has returned to nature; perhaps, Orpheus-like, he has been torn apart and the fragments of his being are now lodged in all nature; perhaps, but it does not seem likely, for the ominous ‘black udder’ would probably only produce Celan's black milk. Another culminating statement follows: maybe he has become a transparent slate on the groaning drum of rocky being, perhaps he is now showing us the meaning behind present suffering, but again this is mere conjecture.

Now, continues Arp in the next section, the world is void: our minds have become dulled, our feet no longer run across open fields, the magic and wonder of life have burned away. Now the sun is no longer whisked behind a tress of clouds for a practical joke: dark storms now threaten, and—the culminating statement—life loses all sense of direction and purpose.

We return to the ‘who … now’ pattern: Who will now comfort us when faced with murky peril, with decay? Who will now tame the winds when evil forces seek to turn Phoebus' horses from their proper course? And again he laments that, without Kaspar to interpret the mysteries of the universe, they will remain for ever insoluble. Kaspar may well be cherished in our memory, but that is as much use as snuff to a dead man.

The passing of Kaspar is as great a disaster as the death of Christ. (‘Why have you forsaken us’ is a deliberate borrowing from the Last Words.) But He died and rose again, whereas Kaspar's death is irrevocable.

It becomes evident that the abilities of Kaspar are essentially those of the child, and the loss of those abilities represents the processes of growing up. The grown man becomes excised from his origins, and the path to adulthood is seen not as enrichment and fulfilment, but as a slow dying of the true self. Arp the adult is seeking in a mood of depression to reach back through time to a union with nature and the universe, hopelessly essaying to recapture the fullness of childhood. But who is Kaspar?

He could be Kaspar Hauser, the mysterious figure who suddenly appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, a man with the mind and acute sensual awareness of a child; or the Kaspar of the Punch and Judy show; or one of the three Wise Men; or simply Childhood. But there is another much more tempting interpretation, which falls in with Arp's delight in ‘playing’ with words. One recalls that his first publication was under the pseudonym ‘rab’, that he produced a volume of poems privately in the ‘pra verlag’, as he called it, and elsewhere delights in manipulating proper names. Kaspar, Kas-par, Kas-Arp. This is particularly appropriate if the name is linked with the comic figure of Alsatian folklore, Hans Kaspar.

So ‘kaspar is dead’ is the centrepiece of the bird plus three, and sees the present as hopeless, and art, by implication, as the only means of keeping open the links with nature and the universe.

Other collections written at about this time show the same process of clarification with succeeding versions as here: two of the four ‘Snowthlehem’ poems (20-23) in the Pyramid petticoat, in their later versions, intensify the themes of falling, the void, decay and emptiness, which express man's present state; and ‘Wonder of the World’ begins as fragments from the newspapers, but is later greatly expanded to emphasise the undertow of despair and hollowness beneath the apparent surface gaiety.

At the beginning of the twenties, Arp took part in the short-lived explosion of Dada in Cologne. He was a leading figure in the notorious crazy Dada exhibition, the sole entrance to which was the gents' toilet of a beer-hall. Richter wryly recalls:

The unexpected shock received by the customers of the beer-hall led to such a commotion that the police came and closed the Fair. They more or less assumed it to be a gathering of homosexuals. On closer inspection, it became apparent that the only morally objectionable object in the exhibition was by a certain Albrecht Dürer … and the Fair was re-opened.

When this gathering collapsed, he pursued the course of Dada to Berlin and at the end of 1920 to Paris. Here Dada spilled over into Surrealism.

It is true that Arp was a proponent of artistic collaboration—he worked, among others, with Schwitters, Ernst, and Sophie—but there is no real indication that Surrealism, or indeed any of the groups in which he became involved, exercised an influence upon him. Arp went his own sweet way, kept in the background, joined in only when others were in sympathy with him. Döhl, in discussing Arp's participation in a host of avant-garde enterprises, makes this very valid point:

In every case it is a matter of artistic movements or groups of artists who came close to Arp's aesthetic principles or corresponded to them in some way. Thus it is that they do not indicate sudden advances or changes in direction in Arp's development as an artist, but rather they represent resting-places on his passage through time.

In 1926 Arp and Sophie moved to Meudon near Paris, where his work gradually began to attract the attention of the art-dealers, and it was here that the first papiers déchirés appeared in 1930.

For a second time world war disrupted his life: he fled first to the south of France, then to Switzerland, where Sophie died in 1943. Renewed experience of mass destruction and private grief cast a long shadow over his work.

In the middle of the 'twenties Arp's manipulative abilities with language are as strong as ever:

herr von so und so
zerstampft seinen papageien
bis sich der papa von der mama scheidet
bis sich der papa von der mama scheidet
sagte ich
und die geien als saft frei werden
die reifen monokel fallen aus den fleisch-
          wolken …

‘Mister so and so / tramples his parrot / until the pa is separated from the ma / until the pa is separated from the ma / i said / and the parrot flows out as juice / the ripe monocles fall from the flesh-clouds …’ The last line is Arp satire at its best, evoking the bloated businessman who can see no further than last month's accounts. It is all in the imperishable tradition of lines like

durch den pisseminuit
den pissematin
den pissemidi
und den pissesoir

which even Arp leaves in virtually untranslatable French. (A very approximate English version might be: ‘through the dawn-soil / the noon-soil / the dusk-soil / and the night-soil’.) There is however one disturbing trend in his poems which begins to manifest itself about this time. The opening of the cycle ‘Four buttons two holes four brooms’ (27) mocks the eloquent silence in a meaningless conversation where no true communication exists, but in a rather pretentious and contrived fashion. The poetry has become wooden; the element of spontaneity, essential to Arp's work, is lost in an over self-conscious repetitiveness. The joke has gone too far; has been spread too thinly over too many words. This becomes even more evident in the ‘Configuration’ sequences, like the ‘Kunigundula-configuration’ dated 1932, where a kind of fugue on ‘the noblewoman’ is hopefully played. It becomes, however, an empty five-finger exercise. The ‘Strasbourg-configuration’ of the same year again gives the impression of going through the motions of writing a poem rather than the genuine article. The sense of the unpredictable is lost; the poet has become virtuoso, still playing brilliant encores long after the audience has left. In these and other poems, although one cannot speak of a precise point in time at which this came about, Arp seems to be approaching the dangerous moment at which technique swallows art. He becomes so proficient at producing this kind of verse that it comes out ‘automatically’ in the wrong sense. For this reason the whole of the cycle ‘Hairy hearts’ is a disappointment.

But it is clear that Arp recognises the danger, and lets this side of his work atrophy for a while. He is thus treating his poetry in the same way as his sculptures; he applies exactly the same approach of letting something grow until it has grown enough and then allowing something else to take its place in both visual and written arts.

His work is like nature from which it draws its primary inspiration. The underlying laws are the same, but the outward appearance changes to suit the mood of the passing hour and the alternation of the seasons. There are bad patches of rank growth, but the balance of nature is restored in the end.

And when the world becomes bleak, towards the outbreak of the Second World War, so too do the poems.

Gestalten wie verjährter Widerhall ziehen an mir
          vorüber.
Gallertartige Gewebe verhüllen eine groβe Puppe,
die auf einem einsamen Platz aufgestellt ist.
Es stöhnt im Hoffnungslosen.
Die finstere Schattenkrone, die auf der Welt lastet,
will sich nicht heben.
Wo sind die veilchenblauen Auen des Himmels?
Selige haben sie vor langer Zeit
in ihren Augen fortgetragen.
Meine Träume zerschinden sich in bösen, steinigen
          Betten.
Vergeblich ging ich tausend Wege.
Immer drohten die Türme einzustürzen,
auf denen ich Ausschau halten wollte.
An abgründigen Aschehimmeln lauern böse, greise
          Spinnen.
Ihr Herz schreit miβtönend auf.
Auch sie sind Verwunschene wie ich.
Ich habe die Spuren des Lichtes verloren.
Ich kann aus meiner grauen Heimat nicht ent-
          fliehen.
Was nützen mich die Lieder,
die sich von der einen Seite auf die andere legen.
Sie sind wie die todmüden Bergführer.
Sie antworten aus verwelkten Herzen die gleichen
          Sätze:
Das Edelblau ist auch nur Traumgefunkel.
Wer spiegelnde Hände hat, hüte sich gut,
daβ kein Hauch sie trübe …

(31)

This is one of the poems which depend more on the creation of an awesome atmosphere than on a play of words, but there are two brilliant flashes of wordplay in it. First, the general direction of the poem: in an atmosphere of decay, despair and destruction—the valley of the shadow of death—the poet seeks in vain the past wholeness of nature. The clouds that hang over the earth are the swirling smoke from the annihilation of mankind rather than harbingers of refreshing rain; the rivers have dried up; the world is a grey monotone, the brightness of the blue heaven has vanished for ever.

And chance conspires with Arp to bring about two superb tours de force: the poem is a search for a way out of greyness to blueness, and rests on the vowel-sounds of ‘grau’ and ‘blau’, which dominate the whole of the poem in a mournful, despairing cry, which finally dies away on a breath (‘Hauch’), the word Arp used in the introduction to the ‘Wonder of the World’ to describe the elusiveness of life. Even more remarkable is the constant search of the self (‘ich’) to find itself among the light (‘Licht’), in the middle of which it is: ‘L-ich-t’.

‘In the hopeless’ illustrates the two parallel tendencies which are emerging: the one reaches back to an ideal past, the other confronts and decries the horrors of the present. An example of the former is the beautiful ‘Half deer half maiden’, in which this hybrid fantasy creature alights in the poet's dream-garden and confides in an old, decaying tree that eyes are never extinguished, that the stars never fade, that the earth is heaven:

Und der alte morsche Baum
beginnt zu grünen und zu blühen.

(32)

This is delightful, but purely self-indulgent wish-fulfilment. On the other hand, the poem ‘Against your will’ (33) from the same collection as this and ‘In the hopeless’ (The uncertain world, the dates of the composition of which are identical to those of the start and end of the Second World War), contains an open attack on ‘your robots’, the mechanised self-destructiveness of civilisation. This dual focus between real world and dream world leads to some interesting tensions in the last collections Arp published.

Some of the poems of the war years are ponderous, consciously ‘poetic’ even, in their escapism, but before turning to the more delicate flight of Moonsand, two little-known sequences of poems of outstanding charm and simplicity should be mentioned: the elegies to Sophie (34), and Kings before the Flood (35). These two alone refute the frequently-made claim that Arp faded after Dada.

There could be nothing more direct and open than the Sophie poems. She was part of nature, and now has returned to nature (see 7); every passing day is a joy, because it brings the poet one day nearer to reunion with her. But most interesting are the lines which reveal Arp's own faith in his artistic abilities, and the need he feels to explore constantly the same themes in the hope of finding an answer to the problems of personal existence:

Ich spreche kleine, einfältige Sätze
leise für mich hin,
immerfort für mich hin.
Ich spreche kleine, alltägliche, geringe Sätze.
Ich spreche wie die geringen Glocken,
die sich wiederholen und wiederholen.

(34)

The Kings before the Flood demonstrates that Arp's wit with a purpose is still very much alive: the funniest of these is the tale of the great King Thouthou, who lived in the city of Schuruppak, in great harmony with his people. His mission in life was to eat his subjects; theirs was to be eaten by him. Each was happy in their work:

Und er fraβ unaufhörlich weiter,
bis schlieβlich die letzten seines Volkes laut jubelnd
durch sein Maul in den Bauch geschritten waren.
Als niemand mehr zum fressen da war,
hielt er sein Lebenswerk für beendet,
trocknete ein, wurde morsch, zerbröckelte und
          zerfiel zu Staub.

(35)

A clearer, yet less bitter, message to self-satisfied common man would be hard to find.

After the war, Arp returned to Paris to the house in Meudon which had been purchased in the late 'twenties. In the garden a studio was built, and the subsequent acquisition of the neighbouring house further increased studio facilities. Paris was to be his principal home until his death (June 7th, 1966), but from 1959 onwards he chose Solduno as his second home. In the same year he married Marguerite Hagenbach, whom he had first met in 1932, and who had been a friend of the Arps for many years.

His international reputation, particularly as a sculptor, brought him commissions from many places, for example, the famous ‘Shepherd of the clouds’ (1953), executed for the University of Caracas. His inspiration and energies never flagged, as can be witnessed by the three new collections of German verse that appeared between 1960 and his death: Moonsand, Pensive flames, and The dream-captain's log.

Although the separate elements of this poetic trio represent three quite distinct stages along a continuing path of development, they have much in common, both among themselves, and with Arp's previous poetry. Many of the old forms, devices, and preoccupations recur, but in a different and more technically advanced guise, to reflect the unhalting progress of his poetic gifts and his persistently acute awareness of the world about him.

Moonsand, the first of these collections, grew from an idea put forward by Brigitte Neske, who asked Arp if he had a poem suitable for an anthology she was planning which was to bear the title Moonbook. ‘This idea,’ wrote Arp, ‘inspired me to dedicate a whole series of poems to the moon.’

The poems in Moonsand fall into three clear groups: short, unobtrusive poems, nestling at the foot of the page; long, thin poems; and fat, self-aggrandising poems sprawling across the whole page. There are also various hybrid forms. Length and shape are determined by content; and, far from being haphazard, the three groups reflect the three main areas within which Arp is operating in this collection.

To take the last group first, a representative of the sprawling type:

Altherwürdige Mondeier
und darunter viele schrecklich verschimmelte
in Sfumatosänften.
Leider ist nicht alles Mond, was Silber ist.
Einige blümerante Unholde sind unter
den freβsäckenden Talmimonden,
die eine Schattenmatte um die andere
          Schattenmatte,
Riesentränen aus Pech,
und mit gleicher Lust die eigne Brut
verschlingen verschlingen verschlingen.
Doppelköpfige Monde,
Monde mit einer Nabel von gewaltiger
          Brisanz
und was sich darauf reimt wie
Glanz, Kranz, Vakanz, Byzanz, Hans.
Ja, auch Mondfahrer und Mondträumer,
wie ich einer bin,
werden sich zu dem Mondtreffen einstellen.

(41)

In isolation, this poem, like the others of its group, does not make a great deal of sense, as Usinger makes clear in his analysis of one, in which he concludes that it is a mere string of ‘Mond-Wortspiele’ (‘moon-puns’), far removed from reality, an abstract game within language. But none of the poems in Moonsand is intended to be sufficient unto itself, and a recognition of this interdependence is essential to an understanding of the volume as a whole. ‘Venerable moon-eggs’ particularly needs to be related to the preceding poem, itself one of the sprawlers, in which the subject is a great moon-meeting of moon-delegates. (40) So these two poems, apart from their many other references to the rest of the volume, can be seen as theme and variation. If ‘A great moon-meeting’ is suffused with contrived gaiety, this poem certainly strikes a more sombre note. The venerable moon-eggs, the grand old men of this moon congress, are mostly rotten and stinking. Also present are wicked, gluttonous and cannibalistic moons. The language is distorted and grotesque, with the twisted proverb ‘All that silvers is not moon’, and the tortuous ‘Giant tears of pitch’. (Pech also means ‘bad luck’, and Riesentränen aus Pech is a pun on Pechsträhne, ‘a run of bad luck’.) The poem bristles with alliterative and assonantal combinations; in fact, this group as a whole follows a pattern of self-conscious and contrived conceits, as in ‘A great moon-meeting’, where some of the delegates are ‘moon-anagrams consisting almost entirely / of Anna / and which have had added to them / only a couple of grams of moon’. For the most part, these poems contain a catalogue of elements, for example, different brands of moon, which is both disjointed and tends to draw attention from the meaning to the form of the words. In ‘Venerable moon-eggs’, the last of the moon-types listed, the one with the high-explosive navel, sets off the most extravagant string of nouns with the same sounds: ‘Glanz, Kranz, Vakanz, Byzanz’. Of these only the first two are even mildly relevant to what has gone before, but suddenly the chance constellation of sounds brings the whole poem together in the last word of the set: ‘Hans’. Depersonalised intellectual virtuosity comes totally unpredictably into focus: the poet commits himself, allies Hans Arp with the moon-dreamers and moon-travellers, and this sense of involvement rescues the poem from its previous abstraction and self-containment. So Arp still applies the principle that chance is the best kind of causality; his poetry still contains the element of surprise, the idea that all things are possible, that order can emerge out of apparent chaos. Arp finds again a link through art between himself and the intangible world of nature and the imagination, but the extravagance of this group of poems, and the strong feeling of relief in the last lines of ‘Venerable moon-eggs’, suggests that the gulf is a wide one. The nature of these two areas, the poet and present reality, and the poet and nature, needs closer definition. Reality is shown for what it is in ‘Day and night’ (42), which attacks the world of materialists, those who hear only numbers, the sounds of the counting-house, for theirs is a fragmented world divided against itself. Each component is separate, and every man hides away his allotted share in a private cage: dead silver belongs to one furtive isolated individual, whereas living moon-silver belongs to all who care to acknowledge it.

And in Moonsand it is the silver natural world of the moon which, for the most part, holds the ascendancy; in one poem, the moon transforms even gold into silver, sending the usurer into a wild hysteria of despair (44). The moon indeed transforms all things in its gentle passage across the earth. It is in the long, thin poems that the mysterious thread of the moon's shifting faces is traced. And it is the very indefinability of the moon that marks it out from the acquisitive gold-grubbers of the insane rational world below. For all its diversity, though, the moon is a unifying force, which brings together the natural and the supernatural by means of the one human activity, the dream, that can bridge the two. (See the poem ‘Away it soars, away it soars’ (39).)

It is the third group of poems—the short, simple ones—which states most directly this aspiration towards the moon, like the opening poem of the collection, in which an angel asks to be allowed to compose poems to the moon (36). Through art the moon and all it represents can be revealed; but the polite urgency of the angel's request again reminds us of the vastness of the gulf between moon and man. Only by re-awakening our spiritual powers, only by breaking down the world as it exists and building it anew, can we aspire to become part of this unity.

In the remarkable poem ‘A moon turned in on itself’ (49) all the attributes of the three groups in the collection combine, culminating in the line ‘Ein inniger unsinniger Mond’, which, read as four separate entities, means ‘An intimate insane moon’. Looked at with different eyes, the eyes of a moon-dreamer seeking unity and a new order, it becomes ‘Ein inniger UNS inniger Mond’, ‘An intimate, to us intimate moon’. A prosaic, fragmented view of the world makes the moon meaningless; but break down the barriers of reason and a new meaningfulness will emerge.

The final poem of the collection (50) bears a warning which points forward to the next two volumes: to the materialist, the moon appears static, another object to be isolated and identified, but to the moon-dreamer it can be seen to ‘fall into the bottomless abyss / … / to rise up again / in the same instant / from the bottomless abyss / silent wild silver smiling’. The void and the bottomless abyss are phrases that repeatedly recur in Arp's poetry, signifying the terrible fate of man cut off from God; only the moon-dreamer, only those willing to seek a realm beyond the material sphere can escape it. Only the moon can fall into the abyss and rise up again unscathed. It is this terrible fate that Pensive flames explores.

In Moonsand there are twenty-nine poems and twenty question marks; in Pensive flames there are forty-two poems and seventy question marks. Discounting rhetorical questions, all the questions in Moonsand receive some kind of answer; in Pensive flames, however, not one meets with a satisfactory reply. The collection centres round an unanswered question: ‘Where are the angels?’; which, in various guises, haunts the whole volume. In form, the poems fall into the same three groups as can be detected in Moonsand, but now their function has changed completely. A dramatic example of this switch of tone can be seen in this poem, one of the long, thin variety which in Moonsand traced the swiftly-changing moods of the moon and its underlying unity:

O wie freut sich der Stern
über das Silber des Engels.
Ist der Engel eine silberne Rose?
Ist die Rose ein Stern?
Ist der Stern ein Traum?
Träumt der Traum
vom Engel oder der Rose?
O wie freut sich der Engel
über das Silber des Traumes.
Ist die silberne Rose ein Engel?
O wie freut sich die Rose
über das Licht des Engels.
Umgeben silberne Rosen silberne Engel?
O wie duften die Sterne.
O wie freut sich die Rose
über den Traum des Sternes.
Ist es ein Traum?
Ist es ein Licht?
Ist es ein Engel?

(55)

This bears a very close resemblance to ‘Away it soars, away it soars’ (39) from Moonsand, which was mentioned earlier. The same elements are present—angel, rose, dream (supernatural, natural, and the link between them)—except for the moon, which has now become a star, a remote pinprick instead of a close companion of the earth. The interaction between nature, dream and the universe is still the subject, but, whereas in the Moonsand poem ‘moon-angels surround the great rose’ is stated as a fact, here it becomes a question. Also the lines referring to the angel holding the rose and the dream in its moonish hands have vanished. The Moonsand poem is a unified whole, beginning and ending with the identical words ‘Away it soars, away it soars’, which express the elusiveness, changes and essential oneness of the moon; in Pensive flames, however, we find—particularly in the last three questions of this poem—a search for a harmony which has slipped far beyond our grasp, a harmony which, these questions suggest, might not even exist any longer. If it does, it is no longer an intimate part of common human experience. No more can moon-dreamer share the mysteries of the moon; only nature and the angels can still participate. Man is excluded, bewildered and disorientated, and the poem, heavy with questions, ends beseechingly.

The tensions of this condition of paradise lost cause wild oscillations between extremes of depression and optimism. On the one hand there is the militant euphoria of this poem, with its Goethean opening suggesting a parallel between synaesthesia and synthesis:

Hört mit den Augen!
Seht mit den Ohren!
Die himmlischen Lichtmusikanten kommen.
Sie kommen schnurstracks aus dem höchsten
          Licht.
Sie kommen schnurstracks aus dem höchsten
          Klingen
um uns wieder zurecht zu singen.

(60)

Here, as elsewhere, the vanished unity is expressed as ‘light’: musicians of light, flowers of light, dreams of light, web of light, such phrases abound in these poems. But the light comes from a remote source, seeking in vain to penetrate the cloud of unknowing that now enshrouds man. And the search for light becomes all the more urgent, all the more pleading:

Dürfen wir um ein Wunder bitten?
Könnte nicht ein abkömmlicher Engel
uns ein wenig zu Hilfe eilen?

(61)

He begs for a redundant angel to offer just a little help, and the humour of lines like those above and

Hilfe Hilfe!
Wo sind die Engel?
Bedienung Bedienung!
Ist das eine Bedienung!

(62)

is tarnished with a hopelessness and despair not to be found in Moonsand.

This is particularly so in the equivalent of the Moonsand sprawling, self-assertive group of poems. ‘How we love to keep on listening’ (64) is full of the jargon of diplomacy, bureaucracy, and the military: among the sharp exchanges of notes, returned ambassadors and unturned coats, plaster casts of mighty streams of words, the timid plea ‘Where are the angels?’ is utterly drowned. Contemporary life, with its emphasis on the machine and progress at all costs, has been deprived of all humanity. No one grows real mushrooms any more, production has switched to atomic mushroom clouds:

Ich bin für die Atompilzzüchter sowieso verloren.
Für sie gehöre ich zu den Hoffnungslosen
die aus den letzten altertümlichen Klausen kommen
die noch auf dem Erdboden gebaut worden sind.

(52)

The poet, instead of both sensing and participating in the oneness of the universe, is now in total isolation, as anachronistic and unworldly as a monk in his cell. ‘They’ have succeeded in making the bomb palatable by turning it into a ‘bomb-bon’.

What is implicit in Moonsand, that is, that the moon-dreamers are like a tiny, dying, closed religious community, comes into the open in Pensive flames. Arp turns against the world which denies the validity of the imponderable, which questions the existence of anything that cannot be quoted on the stock exchange in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. Arp deplores the crushing of the imagination and the spirit by the machine. When the moon-dreamers and the moons gathered for the great moon-meeting, each was equal before the universe, each was an essential part of a unified whole. There was no question of subordination, of worship of a being or thing greater than, and outside the individual, only of participation in a common experience. But now the machine has fragmented the world, turned one man against another in the race to what Arp acidly calls—borrowing contemporary political jargon—‘the highest levels’.

Wann haben die Fortschrittler genug geschritten?
Wann haben die Überrunder genug gerundet?
Wann sind die Überrunder endlich rund ge-
          worden?
Wann ist die höchste Ebene hoch genug?

(51)

Unlike the angels, whose wings can carry them beyond the narrow confines of the physical world, those in the vanguard of material progress are tied to the ground, striding on the level whilst they think they are getting higher and higher; and, moreover, they are not even moving in a straight line of advance, but simply lapping one another, going round in circles, achieving only the illusion of progress. When will the overlappers finally describe a pure circle like the perfect sphere of the moon; and when will the highest level begin to approximate the heights of heaven? The poem ends bitterly:

Was da so hinflattert
sind Menschen
die Gott verloren haben.

(51)

Fluttering up there are not human beings who have grown wings and are soaring into heaven, but men, lost in a friendless void, who can no longer find the divine, for they have set out on a false road, are perhaps looking for a road that no longer exists.

And the machine-monster, represented by the prefix ‘super-’, which crept in once or twice in Moonsand, spreads like a cancer over Pensive flames:

Wir sind gegen die Übertobsüchtigen
gegen die Übermaschinenzuhälter …

(59)

Even religion can offer no consolation. An institutionalised analgesic against the agony of existence, it merely underlines the godlessness of the world:

Immer häufiger
sieht man Menschen
mit geschlossenen Augen dastehen.
Sie versuchen zu beten.

(53)

This is one of the group of short simple poems which expresses not, as in Moonsand, fulfilment, but vain aspiration. Men stand with their eyes closed trying to pray, but they are merely going through the motions of a dead ritual. Either they are praying to the wrong God, or there is no God to pray to any more.

In Moonsand many of the poems seem at first to be disorganised, lacking in focus, until suddenly some chance constellation of sounds, words or ideas gather the fragments into a meaningful statement. The poems resolve, often in a regular rhyming metrical form, to reflect the oneness of the universe. In Pensive flames the pattern is reversed. ‘You foolish little days’ (‘Ihr dummen kleinen Tage’) begins like an emigré from a Romantic song-cycle, but then immediately breaks down to reflect the unbridgeable gulf between transient and immanent.

So Pensive flames marks a stage on the road to a world without God, where men hover in the void, the bottomless abyss. It points back to what was perhaps merely an illusion of oneness in Moonsand; and also forward to the greater despair of The dream-captain's log in a stanza like

Führt dieser Weg
zu dem gekreuzigten Kreuz?
Führt dieser Weg
zu dem Kranz aus lichten Blicken?
Ist es dort?
Ist es überall?
Ist es in mir?

(57)

It is this last question, where doubt turns in on the self, that Arp's last collection explores.

The fluid, rather helpless shapes of the stars (very close to the marble sculpture ‘Etoile’ (1939-1960) drifting across the blue sky of the outside cover of Pensive flames have become, on the dust-jacket of The dream-captain's log, shapeless blobs scorched on a garish red field. Most of the illustrations inside have lost the upward-reaching simplicity of natural objects in the former volume, where a flower, cut in one corner like a jigsaw, aspires to fit the missing piece, a star-shape; where a pair of wings, like disembodied moustaches, flaps demurely up the page; and where a man dances on a plinth, struggling to free himself and turn his arms into wings. In The dream-captain's log the figure of a man, or of an angel with its wings clipped, falls hopelessly into the void; there are shapeless, ominous blobs like black clouds; and the rest of the illustrations are like the nightmare battles of giant spiders, that favourite Arpian image of despair, within their webs. All the poems in the volume are long, a cross between the sprawling and long, thin groups of Moonsand and Pensive flames. Their untidy, rambling, disjointed appearance is heightened by the sombre drawings, only the first half of which have the clear outline of Arp's paper cutouts; the rest, from their texture, are heavy brushwork blackening the whole page.

Pensive flames broke away from the otherworldly wish-fulfilment of the moon-dreamers and confronted the fact that a gulf existed between earth and heaven, and the impossibility of bridging it in reality. The dream-captain's voyage, a nightmare journey, takes this situation to its logical conclusion. If man stands alone, surrounded by a hostile, inhuman universe, unable to break through the dark clouds to the light beyond, he begins to question his own position, his rôle, if any, in that universe. He turns in on himself, wondering who he is, wondering even if he really is a living being:

Zum tausendsten Mal
tritt er vor seinen Spiegel
aber sieht sich nicht im Spiegel.
Er hat sich noch nie gesehen.
Er will aber wissen wie er aussieht.

(70)

He speculates on what he might be. He pictures himself as a mad wanderer reeling about like a drunken river frightening the laughing brooks and sending them scuttling off to the graveyard of brooks. Perhaps he is responsible for the loss of harmony. In a frenzy of guilt he smashes mirror after mirror, hoping the shattered fragments will reflect what he is; by this symbolic gesture Arp, it seems, is losing faith in the possibility of creating a new world by breaking down the old. The poème déchiré is drained of its magical powers. The man standing before the mirror now demands if he even exists at all. Perhaps he doesn't have an appearance. Perhaps he is invisible. Perhaps he is a dot, less than a dot, the child of a dot. Man has become meaningless. He is nothing, can hope for nothing. And the poem ends with bitter humour:

Verzweifelt vor Hoffnungslosigkeit
läuft er auf die Straβe.
Niemand sieht ihn.

(70)

The invisible man; an irrelevance in a world he is powerless to control, totally unable to understand. God is dead. All man has left is the fact of his own existence, the anguished responsibility of being utterly alone. Even the brooks, the representatives of nature and the true reflection of the divine, have fled. The angels have shut up shop and left the world to its collision course with annihilation.

The major theme of the collection, then, is the issue of self-identity. For the most part, the poems brood on this problem. No longer is the principal question: ‘Where are the angels?’ but ‘Who am I?’ (67)

The consolations of art seem poor now; formerly, in Moonsand, Arp was able to fabricate a consistent poetic affirmation of oneness, but now, it seems, he recognises that the artist is not a special case. He too is in the void. Now the dehumanising process of urban civilisation have struck deep into the heart of man, and are rapidly killing off in him his true humanity. Now the ‘play’ with words comes home to roost: it tells Arp that the world of art can no longer act as a certain guide, a connection between man and his origins. The world is too bad and man too helpless to be able to extricate himself. In such a situation the child of a dot who goes out into the street unnoticed is not an object of guileless mirth: he is a tragic figure, twentieth-century man.

With such an immense void between the world and the spirit man is compelled to commit himself to either one or the other, to submit to circumstances or have faith that God might still exist; and in ‘The Railings’ (71), which represent the prison of life, a man behind the railings announces that he will leap over them and release himself; for, he cries, he wants to become a dreamer. Leaping over railings is, of course, streng verboten; but the arbitrary regulations have to be broken, man has to make a positive act of faith if he is to have any chance of release:

Ich steige über das Geländer.
Vielleicht wachsen den Toten
im Bodenlosen Flügel.

(71)

This man who wants to dream, who aspires to merge himself with the universe, can no longer achieve his longings in this world, for God has left it. Only by surrendering his life will he—perhaps—find Him again. A dead man, who has been listening to this, says that it is at last beginning to dawn on the living that only those with enough courage to leap into the void will wake for ever. The ‘dream’ of the moon-dreamers is openly affirmed as true wakefulness. It is life which is a nightmare; and once this is recognised, the living climb over the railings by the thousand. They go to join ‘die innigen Unsinnigen’ (‘the intimate insane’), a phrase which first appeared in Moonsand describing the nature of the moon (49). Life below is mad, plagued by insane rationality; only in the ‘madness’ of the dream can man re-establish his bonds with the universe. But the dream means death, denial of life in order to gain a higher life.

And the collection ends with a poem which rounds it off much in the same way that Revelation brings the Bible to a close (76). Now dreams will last for ever, and all is bathed in heavenly light. Now there are no swords to cut down all living things. The terrible ‘It’, the monster of the deep, has vanished without trace. This is the monster war that stalks the pages of Pensive flames and The dream-captain's log. In this visionary poem, however, the monster born of the age of the machine is petrified, and Arp rejoices in a string of alliterative adjectives:

Ja, der entsetzliche
der scheuβliche grauengreuliche schändliche
der glucksende japsende Nabeltrichter des Satans
umgeben von unnatürlich gepflegten Gesäβ-
          schwielen ist versteinert.

(76)

No more nameless monsters will devour the woodlands, and turn them into petrified paper-bags, as happened in ‘kaspar is dead’.

The link between without and within, between the soul of man and the soul of the universe, has been rejoined. The ‘waking dream’ has seen to that. And, seemingly bringing these last three collections to a triumphant end, Arp states that no one need ask questions any more, for all questions are answered. There is no necessity to demand: ‘Where are the angels?’, for men have become angels; nor ‘Who am I?’, because the self has become merged with the universe, and individual self-isolating identity is now irrelevant. This is the dream that Arp pursued throughout his works.

But ‘The Railings’ (71) has established that the waking dream is death, and this final poem serves only to emphasise that the gulf has widened to the point at which only death can be true life. And as no one can see over the railings to what lies beyond the grave, Arp can only have faith that his dream of the unio mystica is not an empty fantasy.

So towards the end of his life, Arp's faith in the power of art to keep alive the bonds between man and nature is badly shaken. His despair becomes open, but his poetic gifts remain as strong as ever.

It is puzzling, to say the least, that Arp the poet should so often be regarded as either a writer of nonsense, of abstract paintings in words, or as a ‘mystic’, who utters profundities beyond the comprehension of mere mortals in a kind of poetic Etruscan, for the indictment he brings against contemporary society and his affirmation of nature and the spirit could scarcely be clearer, more pertinent to our present condition. Where the tension between him and his environment is recognised, Arp is dismissed as a ‘Romantic’, as if this were some unfortunate affliction.

He is a Romantic in the sense that he and society are in open conflict, but he neither turns his back on the world, nor indulges in escapism to some pseudo-medieval paradise. He conducts a frontal attack on the machine age, the era of godlessness, and proffers means of returning to a state of grace, through nature and the restoration of human values.

Perhaps this is an unfashionable message, and perhaps it is too near the truth to be palatable.

Arp was concerned throughout his life consistently with existential problems: the loss of God; the isolation of man; the problem of individual responsibility and collective guilt; the feeling of being suspended in a void; the anguished search for identity and renewed relations with nature and the realms of the spirit.

His work has grown like nature itself: one can no more understand it than nature by peering at one tiny specimen. Only when the invisible threads of vocabulary, imagery and technique which hold it together as one vast living organism are recognised, does his poetry speak unambiguously.

And there is no doubt of its prime significance to Arp. Talking to Marcel Jean as they were looking through collections of his poetry, he said: ‘If the impossible happened and I had to make the choice between the plastic arts and written poetry, if I had to abandon either sculpture or poems, I should chose to write poems.’