Dreams and dream imagery constitute an important, if far from pervasive theme in the postwar German lyric….

At first glance, Celan seems to stand in the surrealist tradition…. Celan's own poetry of the first three postwar years abounds in images and stylistic devices which have a close affinity with those typical of surrealistic verse….

Celan's dream imagery is puzzling. In many cases individual images and entire poems at first defy explication. At the risk of seeming to oversimplify this complex problem, I propose that the following three theses provide the necessary basis for gaining access to the enigmatic dream world of Celan's poetry: 1) Celan … is a Holocaust poet, and the dream world in his early poetry is related to the phenomenon, often noted in literature on the Holocaust, that for the victims reality had become a nightmare; 2) many of Celan's early poems, whether the word dream is explicitly...