PHANTASUS
Contemporary German Poetry. Translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky. 12mo. 201 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $1.75.
ABOUT modern German poetry, with its barbaric gravity, with its goose-step from one philosophy to another: especially about the fantastic bulk of it there is something preposterous and incredible; at least one has this feeling when reading the introduction to the anthology compiled by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky. They write as if they were describing something imaginary. These poets they discuss, who attained "a heightened emotional tonus," who wore their "boutonnière with a difference," who wreathed "roses of cement about the brow of Berlin," obviously never existed; they were invented like Earl Roppel or the Spectric School, as a vaster hoax. In face of such description to believe in their reality demands an act of faith, and yet they can be proved by the simplest empirical laws or by their collected volumes, numerous enough to pave the highroad of their flight to Berlin, after the suppression of the revolt in Munich. The introduction to Contemporary German Poetry is exact in spite of its affectations and alembications; it defines a literature which is real but improbable.
Naturalism in Germany followed sentimentalism and was followed in turn by symbolism, mysticism, fantaisisme. The last of these schools was founded by Alfred Mombert, or by Arno Holz, who wrote lines of uneven length which he centred round a vertical axis, giving his poems the silhouette of a pagoda. The title of his principal work, Phantasus, might be applied to the whole of con- temporary German verse.
However, the period described and translated in the present volume begins earlier, toward the middle 'eighties, with the naturalism of Detlev von Liliencron. Miss Deutsch's own technique renders him admirably into English, and her lyrical versions of his friend, Dehmel, and of the mystical but straightforward poems of Rainer Maria Rilke can be praised equally. With Stefan George, chief of
