SOURCE: “The Making of a Poet: H. M. Enzensberger,” in German Life & Letters, Vol. XXI, No. 1, October 1967, pp. 27-44.

In the following excerpt, Bridgewater finds that Enzensberger's first three verse collections evince the influence of such writers as Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, W. H. Auden, and others.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger was born in 1929. To date he has published the three books of poems that are about what we might expect from a poet of his age: verteidigung der wölfe, 1957; landessprache, 1960; blindenschrift, 1964. In considering the work of a poet still only in his mid-thirties, it is legitimate and instructive to see what he has learnt from other poets. All young poets learn from their poetic predecessors—they would be fools, and there would be no poetic tradition, if they did not. It is, of course, what is learnt and how it works which is of interest. In the...