Poetic language, in [Celan's] view, has become a rescuing device, a mode of speech barely audible and yet of sufficient intensity to wrench the poem back from the verge of its self-abolition in the realm of silence…. [When] Celan speaks of the poem's tendency towards silence he is speaking not in terms of an aesthetic absorbed from outside … but in terms of the more immediately commanding dictates of personal emotion.

For silence, in Celan's work, is felt not only as a negative situation, but also as a force…. [The premise of the early poem 'Chanson einer Dame im Schatten' is that the] man who speaks too soon is ruined and a mysterious silence triumphs: and hence, despite the poem's obvious sexual implications, it is impossible not to read it as being to some extent also a metaphor of the poet's situation—that the spoken word must ever yield to the potency of what Celan will later term 'das erschwiegene Wort'…. Rilke's consciousness of the overwhelming force of 'das Unsägliche'; Valéry's 'tumulte au silence pareil'; Eliot's concept of the 'inarticulate' on which the poet is compelled to make continual raids—from none of these does Celan … seem very far removed. But to say this is to ignore an all-important component of Celan's region of silence—the role, therein, of violence…. The specific sorrow to which Celan's poems most constantly refer is that caused by the Nazi death-camps, and he returns by frequent implication to the inadequacy of words to render the magnitude of this theme…. The word sought, the word 'nach dem Bilde des Schweigens', is thus one which will be commensurate with the horror it expresses and which will yet at the same time, transform it. At its simplest level silence, in Celan, implies death and the majority of his poems are in fact explorations into the realm of the dead. But here, of course, is the paradox—that the poet can explore silence only by means of its opposite condition, words. And thus silence is both desired and feared, desired as the region in which the beloved dead have their being, and feared because, by its very nature, it constitutes a threat to the poet's sole means of ingress. Hence, if the poet's attitude to silence fluctuates, so does his attitude to words. (pp. 127-29)

In Celan's third collection of poems, Sprachgitter (1959) there occurs an obvious change in, or refinement of, poetic technique. Characteristic of the earlier volumes, Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952) and, to a lesser extent, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955) is a strong element of incantation, a somewhat sotto voce incantation of overtly hypnotic effect. But in Sprachgitter this element has receded: and although the final poem in the collection, Engführung (the German term for the stretto of a fugue) explicitly evokes a musical parallel, the music of these poems is much closer to that of, say, Webern, than to any incantation—sparse, intensely compressed and glacially beautiful: the product, one may feel, of a resolution that the poet's themes shall not become 'wild / überwuchert von Worten'.

Yet this paring down of the poet's means of expression is accompanied by an increased preoccupation with the range of expressive power which language possesses—and, concomitantly with this, with its expressive limitations. This last phrase is ambiguous, and I mean it to be: for it is characteristic of the paradoxical temper of Celan's poetic mind that ideas or situations which logically would be regarded as contrarieties can co-exist and even fuse with each other on the same linguistic plane. Hence it isn't simply playing with words to state that the phrase 'expressive limitations' implies in addition to its primary meaning the suggestion that the very limitations of language may themselves be expressive. 'Words, after speech, reach/into the silence' Eliot has it: and it is this realm, extending from the insufficient spoken or written word to the territory of silence, that Celan's poems have it as their immensely difficult task to explore. The word is the product of the living, silence that of the dead; the word may affirm, silence may negate the affirmation. Yet, as any careful reader of Celan will testify, this negating effect of silence presses heavily upon the poet's consciousness, acting, indeed, as a kind of challenge. It seems, in fact, mysteriously to affirm something: and hence language, at the very point where its limitations become most perceptible, may, precisely in those limitations, be expressive of a possible larger affirmation. And it is perhaps at some such situation as this that the word 'Sprachgitter' hints: a 'Gitter' may impede progress or cut us off from a world outside, but it does not impede vision: one can look out from between the bars.

One of the central themes of Celan's work is, as is well known, his preoccupation with the dead and the ways in which their absence affects the consciousness of the living. His search for what has been called 'das transzendentale Du' has been unremitting, and the world of his poems is thus peculiarly one in which affirmation and negation meet: and, for the exploration of this mental territory, many of the Sprachgitter poems adopt a similar technique. A great many of them open with the simplest form of affirmation, the naming of an object …, or of an object followed immediately by an adjective…. This is frequently followed by the naming of a second, associated object … or by the presentation of some motion or action set in train by the object first named…. There then occurs a gradual associative multiplication, the introduction of further images and a technique of statement, rejection, contradiction, restatement, etc…. (pp. 129-31)

[The poem Blume] is a tentative exploration of the possibilities inherent in the paradox 'Blume—ein Blindenwort', which stands, significantly, at the exact centre of the poem: a word which, though it be the product of vitality and abundance ('das den Sommer heraufkam') will yet somehow include within the scope of its reverberations the opposite condition best described perhaps by John Donne—'absence, darkness, death; things which are not'. The attempt at such a reconciliation is, of course, a theme by no means peculiar to Celan: it is also, for example, a major theme of Rilke's. We have only to think of Rilke's Orpheus, the singer-god to whom the 'beide Bereiche' of the living and the dead are indistinguishable, to see the resemblance; to realize also that in one important sense Celan is a poet of the Orphic tradition. But there is a significant difference in that Celan, unlike Rilke, discards the trappings of the myth…. Moreover, in discarding mythical accoutrements, Celan also implicitly discards their frequent concomitant, the vatic tone. Rilke's triumphant annunciations in the Elegies and Sonnets—the note of 'Rühmen'—give place in Celan to a quality of probing, a delicate exploration of symbolist landscapes—strange venues for a projected encounter between the poet's consciousness and the reality of the dead.

'Projected' encounter—the qualification is important. Rilke's vision of 'das erweiterte Ganze' was an optimistic one, a promise, in a world barricaded by the exigencies of time, of an infinite spatial freedom. In Celan's poems, however, there is no sense of freedom or exhilaration. Most of the poems in Sprachgitter are uncommonly slow-moving, imbued with a sense of the tentative: the 'du' is rarely reached, the encounter remains no more than the simultaneous symbolization of a desire and its non-fulfilment. (p. 132)

The opening, untitled poem in Sprachgitter … consists of eight sections, of which the first seven are concerned with the annunciations of various mysterious voices. Their messages are expressed in imagery which is largely drawn from water and from various types of vegetation. Two main areas of preoccupation seem to emerge—a situation of being emotionally in extremis and, linked with this, a close scrutiny of moments of disturbed time. These elements culminate in the evocation of two sets of incidents drawn from Jewish mythology; and the final section concerns the silence which remains when the 'Stimmen' have died away and which is perhaps more potent than any of them. (p. 134)

The 'Stimmen' poem traces … the emergence of meaning from terrible fragmentation, or, if this formulation suggests too smoothly operating a process, the intuiting of the latent meaning which inheres in fragmentation. Celan's final stanza, I think, makes no greater claim than this. We are not intended to observe the Poem, rising like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, nor do we witness a hope born of despair. We hear, simply, a paradoxical silence: no directing voice, but a 'Spätgeräusch', an excited whispering of incipient creativity.

The 'Stimmen' poem, then, culminates in the speech-silence paradox which is the theme around which most of the Sprachgitter poems turn. Even the most cursory glance through Celan's volumes is enough to reveal the weight attached to the word 'Schweigen' together with its derivates and synonyms—'schweigsam', 'verschweigen', 'stumm', 'verstummen', etc. But the implications of these terms—what we may call Celan's 'modes of silence'—are shifting. Roughly, and without any over-literal intention to claim that one category need necessarily exclude overtones of the others, we may, I think, divide these modes into four main groups. (a) Silence as purely negative, a silence which arises either because there is nothing to consummate or because there is no means of communication…. (b) At other times silence masks mystery, either of the beloved or of the dead…. And with the mystery goes a sense of significance which on occasion … is pitted against the purposeless proliferations of speech…. (c) But the mystery may be more than simply a generalized sense of the inscrutable: it may be the more specific mystery of that which is both figuratively and, ultimately, literally, unspeakable …: the dead, expressive silence of the death-camp victims…. Just as here fertility burgeons from non-existence, so expressiveness may flower from silence…. [This] brings us to the final implication of 'Schweigen', (d) the stirrings of the creative impulse. (pp. 138-40)

There is, of course, a tradition of silence in Western poetry: a tradition which contains both negative elements (as in Dante's despair of the power of words to render the effect of the Beatific Vision) and, in a more positive light, the fascinations which silence has exerted over poets whose preoccupations have taken them to 'die letzte Ortschaft der Worte', the ultimate borders of the expressive powers of language. Celan, as we have seen, has inherited and used both attitudes. But he is also, and with equal relevance, heir to a more localized and specific tradition, that of East European Hasidic Jewry…. (p. 140)