SOURCE: “Gottfried Benn's ‘Karyatide’ in the Context of His Early Poetry, “in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, May, 1980, pp. 96-110.

In the following essay, Holbeche discusses the poem “Karyatide,” concluding that it represents an important stage in the development of Benn's early poetry.

Although Gottfried Benn's ‘Karyatide’ (p. 45),¹ published in 1916, has been one of the most frequently anthologized and discussed of all his poems, it is symptomatic of the persistent tendency of Benn criticism to concentrate on individual poems or to group them in largely synchronic structural or thematic categories that it has rarely been considered within the context of his early poetry as a whole. Moreover, the only critic to have done so in any detail, Else Buddeberg,² has located the poem in an undifferentiated early period extending from 1913 to 1917, without recognizing that, along with other poems published during Benn's years in Brussels (1915-...