The early poetry of Paul Celan

by Adrian Del Caro

Arguably the greatest post-World War II German poet, Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a Holocaust survivor whose work is an anguished and poignant record of his struggle to meet the conflicting demands of remembrance and living in the present. In this remarkable study, Adrian Del Caro explores Celan's early work, examining the poet's relation to the Word of scripture and to "words" of speech. As Del Caro explains, Celan takes the entire Judeo-Christian tradition to task for its failure during the Holocaust. Filled with images and metaphors from the death camps and from Celan's own experience of forced labor, his first two major volumes of poetry, Poppy and Memory (1952) and From Threshold to Threshold (1954), serve as testimony that the Holocaust cannot and must not be forgotten, and that all thought and hence all language has been changed by this event.