[This essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally published in Dimension, Summer 1970.]

When I ask myself what makes Günter Grass so outstanding a phenomenon as a poet, the first answer that occurs to me is: the circumstance that he is so many other things as well, an outstanding novelist, playwright, draughtsman, politician and cook. In an age of specialists such diversity of interest and accomplishment could well be suspect, as indeed it is to some of Günter Grass's critics. Yet the more one looks at Grass's diverse activities the more clearly one sees that they all spring from the same source and centre; also, that the unfashionable diversity is inseparable from his achievement in each of and other, fields, because the whole man moves together, within the area of his dominant tensions and concerns. I am far from wanting to claim that this area...