[A] poet is not vaguely subjective or purely emotional, but makes choices from the objectively given lexical and grammatical tradition of the language; and poetry deals with words and relationships. Three factors … which might influence the poet's choice of language [are] the referential aspect, the phonological aspect, and their interrelationship within a poem's text. (p. 35)

[In considering Paul Celan's "Blume," the] first observation, obvious but important, is that the poem has five stanzas which, except for the second one, are dominated by the nominal style. In asking why Celan adopted this rather than the verbal style, one can suggest the poet's attempt at paring down the means of expression, which is a function of the nonverbal style. That this suggestion is plausible can be demonstrated on the phonological and semantic level. Thus the lightness of the vowels in such words as "Stein," "blind," "Finsternis" points to abstraction rather...