SOURCE: Perkins, C. R. B. “August Stramm: His Attempts to Revitalise the Language of Poetry.” New German Studies 4, no. 3 (autumn 1976): 141-55.

In the following essay, Perkins discusses Stramm's experimental manipulation of poetic language through linguistic techniques such as conversion and syntactical deformation.

August Stramm (1874-1915), a member of the Expressionist circle contributing to Herwarth Walden's journal Der Sturm, blossomed as an experimental poet only in the last two years of his life. His experiments in diction, metre and syntax were far in advance of any of his poetic contemporaries. Stramm had indeed been writing poetry, dramas and stories from early years. His earliest extant work is a play called Die Bauern, written around 1902-4, and more than a decade spans the first and the last of his dramatic productions (Geschehen, 1915). Although nine of Stramm's dramas have been preserved in more or less complete form, all the poems written...