German Poetry

Dr Gray aims to encourage in students beginning to read and write about German poetry the skills which will help them to read and write with more insight. After outlining this aim in its introduction, this 1976 book takes the form of a selection of German poems from Luther to Brecht, carefully grouped for purposes of comparison, and with graded questions. Most of the poems are from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there are also translations from and into German for comparison with the originals, groups of poems on common themes, and different versions of the same poem. It is possible to trace in outline some of the main historical trends of German poetry, and to acquire basic technical knowledge within the book, but its main aim is to guide the reader towards a closer feeling for the words on the page.