On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Joseph Bircumshaw
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> I think a wider context for this kind of discussion might be of use, or at
> least avoid the perils of simplification, there is a world beyonf the
> Anglosphere, after all: candidates for discussion might include the
> undoubtedly politically toxic, but avant-garde, yet comprehensible, duo of
> Gottfried Benn and Giuseppe Ungaretti, the former a doctor, a professed
> Nazi and a fully-fledged Conductor of Chaos, who somehow wrote a small
> number of poems that illuminate what happened with him, and the latter a
> war-poet equal in standing to Owen or Rosenberg, who wrote some of the most
> beautiful imagistic poems of the century, yet who was also more or less
> Mussolini's principal spech-writer at one time, and who, as far as I know,
> never renounced his allegiances, yet wrote one the greatest short poems of
> the century in his old age. I believe he spent much of the post-war period
> in Brazil, where doubtless he could look up old friends. Fleurs du Mal
> indeed. Jon Silkin's fine and determinedly politically proper anthology
> 'Poetry of the Committed Individual' reprinted translations of him without
> so much as a flutter of irony. Terribly gifted individuals, who would be
> high on one's list of people not to meet, definitely not on the other side
> of the desk in a doctor's surgery, in Benn's case. Wonderful poets.
> --
> Joseph "don't call me Dave" Bircumshaw
> "Every old house was scaffolding once/And workmen whistling"
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
>
http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
> The Animal Subsides
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