Wilhelm Lehmann was born in 1882, the same year as those giants of modernism James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Georges Braque, and Igor Stravinsky. He died in 1968, the year of student revolt. Although he was a modern poet, he was too steeped in the German mystical tradition of Meister Eckhart, Jakob Böhme, Spinoza, Goethe, and the romantics to be far in advance of neoromanticism. As for politics, he was so far removed from the realities of state affairs as to remain an engaging ingénu, and the developments of 1968 were certainly as foreign to him as were the ominous trends and events of the years prior to 1914: on 3 August 1914 he wrote his mother, "Seit wann existiert dieser 'Panslawismus'"" (How long has this "panslavism" been around"). His long career as a writer was interrupted by both world wars, and he rose twice to considerable prominence only to fall...