SOURCE: An introduction to Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries by Else Lasker-Schuler, translated by Robert P. Newton, The University of North Carolina Press, 1982, pp. 3-50.

Newton is an American educator, translator, and noted scholar of German poetry. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of Lasker-Schüler's career and the criticism on her works.

Though the basic themes of Lasker-Schüler's art persist through all of her books, lines of thematic and formal development do exist.… Her first-born (Stvx, 1902) contains, if we may believe the poetess, some poems that had been written in her adolescent years, from the age of fifteen to seventeen. In this volume she had not yet developed her most characteristic metrical style—the two- and three-line, free-verse strophes—but her rhymed forms are often handled freely in terms of meter and stanzaic structure. The use of extravagant, grotesque, intensifying metaphor is...