SOURCE: “Between Holderlin and Himmler,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. X, No. 7, April 11, 1968, pp. 21-2.

In the following review, Enright declares Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems “pure poetry” and compares it to Bertolt Brecht's poetry in its precision.

It is scarcely the case that we live in a time when literary conventions are so narrow and stifling that “poetry” must become, for the poet, a dirty word. Far from it. Poetically, anything goes, and the louder the faster, though perhaps not very far. So the more one considers the title of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's volume of selected poems [Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems]—with English translations facing the German text, except on one occasion—the more sadly irrelevant or even senseless it comes to seem. People who don't read poems don't read poems.

In the longest piece here, “summer poem”, the...