Critical Survey

‘Why no appraisals of [Holocaust] verse – particularly verse composed in the English language?’, asks Susan Gubar in Poetry after Auschwitz. The question appears particularly pertinent, if paradoxical, in the context of her list of canonical authors in the field of Holocaust literature, most of whom are either primarily poets (Dan Pagis, Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs) or prose writers as well as poets (Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski). One answer is that critics have rightly attended to the more sophisticated prose in the work of Delbo, Levi and Borowski. However, this has lead to the overshadowing of, for example, the significance of Levi’s ‘Shemà’ as metatestimony in relation to If This is a Man, Borowski’s ‘October Sky’ as a complex, dialectical anti-lyric, and Delbo’s shift into poetic form in Auschwitz and After when she senses that her prose is simply not up to the task of recounting certain traumatic experiences.

Elie Wiesel has claimed that testimony is the generic legacy of the Holocaust. Other critics have pointed out that testimony, in the sense of first-person literary accounts of events to which the author was eye-witness, also characterized earlier historical calamities, in particular the First World War. That war produced testimony in the form of lyric poetry, in which the reader recognized the author as a witness and assumed a close fit to the poem’s speaking subject. Yet it is not poetic but prose testimony that is typical of Holocaust eyewitness, while Holocaust poetry is considered a separate and self-contained genre. In this essay, I will explore the reasons why this should be so, and whether there is a closer link than at first appears between the construction of the first-person narrator of a prose testimony, such as Wiesel’s Night (1958), and the lyric ‘I’ of some Holocaust poetry.

The aim of this article is to explore a tension in understanding post-Holocaust writing, specifically Second Generation poetry, between the idea of ‘working through’ and the complexities of post-Holocaust writing that Antony Rowland describes as ‘awkward poetics’, the ‘noncathartic artistry of disaster’.

In the Spring of 1944, one month before the Gestapo arrested him, sending him first to the prison at Fresnes and then deporting him to Buchenwald and Dachau, Robert Antelme published four poems in Littérature, a newly inaugurated – and ultimately short-lived – literary journal. The journal, which appeared only in that year, aimed to present the work of young French writers. As the editor, René Julliard explains in a preface to the first issue, Littérature did not represent a particular ‘school’, and authors were not bound by restrictions of page numbers or genre. In each issue – which included poems, stories, plays, and essays – the contributions were organized alphabetically, according to the author’s name.

Tadeusz Borowski’s poetry is virtually unknown in Britain and America, despite the fact that the Polish writer was a poet long before he wrote his controversial stories about his experiences in Auschwitz–Birkenau and Dachau. These stories, a selection of which appear in Penguin’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, ensured his canonical status in twentieth-century European literature. Yet only three Borowski poems are readily available in English translations: ‘Night over Birkenau’, ‘The Sun of Auschwitz’ and ‘Farewell to Maria’ are printed in Hilda Schiff’s anthology Holocaust Poetry. A few more appear in the English translation of Adam Zych’s anthology The Auschwitz Poems,3 but this edition is currently out of print.

Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust poetry and the frequently impassioned critical responses to it illustrate why Sue Vice characterises Holocaust fictions as ‘scandalous’, in the sense that ‘they invariably provoke controversy by inspiring repulsion and acclaim in equal measure’ – the only qualification being that this critical divide was not split particularly evenly when Plath’s best-known Holocaust writing was first published in the mid 1960s. In fact, it took the scales of critical opinion several decades to reach any kind of equilibrium, with the ‘repulsed’ response tending to prevail for the quarter century following its initial publication, but with the critical temper noticeably softening in the 1990s: a shift in critical attitudes that reflects the way that notoriously scandalous texts (here one might include some of Plath’s favourites, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses) often end up normalising once controversial subject matter.

Writing in postwar America for an eighteen-year period between 1956 and 1974, the poet Anne Sexton was repeatedly drawn to the Holocaust, and its awkward cultural legacy, as a source of creative inspiration. Still, while her contemporary, Sylvia Plath, has generated a series of fierce debates as a result of the Nazi–Jew symbolism in her poems ‘Daddy’ (1962) and ‘Lady Lazarus’ (1962), there have been no sustained excavations of Sexton’s own complex relationship to the Holocaust. In this article, I aim to shed new light on Sexton’s use of Holocaust imagery by making detailed reference to three of her poems: ‘My Friend, My Friend’ (1959), ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (1971), and ‘After Auschwitz’ (1974). Written at various stages in her career, these poems not only engage with the subject matter of the Holocaust at the level of content, but also at the level of form. More explicitly, these poems display a range of formal eccentricities that register the difficulties of converting the Holocaust into poetry and which, I argue, might be usefully reconsidered alongside recent theoretical discourses on aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and trauma.

In an article entitled ‘Témoignage du camp et poésie’, published in 1948, the former deportee Robert Antelme, author of the now classic deportation text L’Espèce humaine, identifies what he sees as the respective problems of prose and poetic testimonies. The prose account, claims Antelme, in its supposed stark objectivity, all too often reads like some abstract accusatory act, a photograph that may provoke fear and trembling, but from which lessons cannot be explicitly learnt. Poetry, on the other hand, would run the risk of fleeing the reality of the camps, of allowing it to be only glimpsed through melodic counterpoint or nostalgic themes, thus enveloping the reality in a mist of words but never really penetrating it. In fleeing prosaic description, then, poetry would risk falling into obscurity.

The Holocaust has exerted a substantial influence on twentieth-century and contemporary English poetry. One has only to consider Shoah-related work by the likes of Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Tony Harrison to recognise this cultural fact. Further, Jewish poets writing in English have spoken out as especially affected by this European tragedy.

Leros Summer 1939 GEORGE DUNDAS

Friday Night De Toog Eetcafe, Amsterdam ROGER CRAIK

Found Poem Thorn Gruin’s Sorrowful Sonnet JOHN LUCAS

Other Summers by Stephen Edgar (Melbourne: Black Pepper Press, 2006). 108pp. ISBN: 978-1-876044-54-1, $16.00.

Notes on contributors