SOURCE: “Poet of Nihilism,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 26, 1961, p. 326.

In the following review of Primal Vision, the Times Literary Supplement provides an assessment of the English translations of Benn's poetry, concluding that some of Benn's craft is lost, even in the best translations.

At the age of twenty-six Gottfried Benn made his mark in 1912 with the shocking realism of Morgue. By the time of his death in 1956 he was established, after a remarkable comeback, as an extreme champion of what he cryptically called Artistik, poetry of the “free word—the word that yields no tirades … and no commentaries; that produces one thing only: form”. Art had become for him “the last metaphysical activity within European nihilism” through the “power of the nothing to create form”. Benn's public adherence for a time to Nazism produced bitter feelings, voiced among others by Klaus Mann; it was immaterial that he...