SOURCE: “Benn, Pound, and Eliot: The Monologue Art of German Expressionism and Anglo-American Modernism,” in Review of National Literature, Vol. 9, 1978, pp. 10-24.

In the following essay, Paolucci discusses the poetry of Benn in relation to other major poets of German Expressionism.

The Expressionist poet … does not represent, he forms anew. … The world is there. It would make no sense to repeat it.

Kasimir Edschmid, “On Poetic Expressionism” (1917)¹

We are all Expressionists today: people who want to shape the outside world from within themselves.

Paul Joseph Goebbels, Michael (1929)²

The fact that Expressionism can be considered the antithesis (the principal cultural victim) of Nazism as well as its forerunner and kin indicates the complexity and inner range of this movement as well as its central position in the Geistesgeschichte of central Europe.

Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (1959)³

Expressionism, apart from the romanticism of the early eighteen hundreds, is...