Brecht's poetry

Brecht's poetry

While made famous by his many plays, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) also wrote hundreds of poems throughout his life. Brecht began writing poetry as a young boy, and his first poems were published in 1914. Brecht's most influential poetry is featured in his Manual of Piety (Devotions), establishing him as a great poet. His poetry was influenced by folk-ballads, French "chansons", and the poetry of Rimbaud and Villon. Throughout his theatric production, poems are incorporated into the plays with music. In 1951, Brecht issued a recantation of his apparent suppression of poetry in his plays with a note titled "On Poetry and Virtuosity". He writes:

"We shall not need to speak of a play's poetry... something that seemed relatively unimportant in the immediate past. It seemed not only unimportant, but misleading, and the reason was not that the poetic element had been sufficiently developed and observed, but that reality had been tampered with in its name...we had to speak of a truth as distinct from poetry...we have given up examining works of art from their poetic or artistic aspect, and got satisfaction from theatrical works that have no sort of poetic appeal...Such works and performances may have some effect, but it can hardly be a profound one, not even politically. For it is a peculiarity of the theatrical medium that it communicates awarenesses and impulses in the form of pleasure: the depth of the pleasure and the impulse will correspond to the depth of the pleasure."

Themes

Brecht used his poetry to criticize European culture, including Nazis, and the German bourgeois. Brecht's poetry is marked by the effects of the First and Second World Wars. Many of the poems take a Marxist outlook, celebrating the defeat of a capitalist system.

Abridged List of Brecht's Poems

*1940
*A Bad Time for Poetry
*Alabama Song
*Children's Crusade
*Children's Hymn
*Contemplating Hell
*From a German War Primer
*Germany
*Honored Murderer of the People
*How Fortunate the Man with None
*Hymn to Communism
*I Never Loved You More
*I want to Go with the One I Love
*I'm Not Saying Anything Against Alexander
*In Praise of Illegal Work
*In Praise of the Work of the Party
*Mack the Knife
*My Young Son Asks Me
*Not What Was Meant
*O Germany, Pale Mother!
*On Reading a Recent Greek Poet
*On the Critical Attitude
*Parting
*Questions from a Worker Who Reads
*Radio Poem
*Send Me a Leaf
*Solidarity Song
*The Book Burning (The Burning of the Books)
*The Exile of the Poets
*The Invincible Inscription
*The Mask of Evil
*The Sixteen-Year-Old Seamstress Emma Rises before the Magistrate
*The Solution
*To Be Read in the Morning and at Night
*To Posterity
*To the Students and Workers of the Peasants' Faculty
*To Those Born After
*United Front Song
*What Has Happened?

Bibliography

*Calabro, Tony. 1990. "Bertolt Brecht and the Art of Dissemblance". Longwood Academic.


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