Poetry Magazine
Divergences
One says: please no inner life,
manners by all means, but nothing affective,
that’s no compensation
for the insufferable
difficulties of outward-directed expression—
those cerebralized
city-Styxes
when my little prince
pokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot
it melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst,
and it’s no different now
the contraries are not easy to reconcile
but when you survey the provinces
the inner life
has it by a neck.
Source: Poetry (March 2012).
Biography
Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) served in the German army’s medical corps during WWI and used his clinical experiences as inspiration for his first collections of poetry, Morgue und andere Gedichte (1912) and Fleisch (1917).
Poems by Gottfried Benn
Poem Categorization
POET’S REGION Germany
Poetic Terms Free Verse
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