SOURCE: “The Usefulness of Poets,” in The Nation, Vol. 230, No. 17, May 3, 1980, pp. 528-30.

In the following review, Hamburger analyzes the themes of Der Untergang der Titanic (The Sinking of the Titanic) and affirms the poem as “a celebration of bare survival.”

How intelligent can a good poet afford to be? How knowing? How tough-minded? How well-informed? There have been times in H.M. Enzensberger's writing life when these questions troubled many of his readers and critics; and not only when Enzensberger himself posed them in his essays and statements, such as his virtual renunciation and denunciation of poetry in the later 1960s. After his three early collections, published between 1957 and 1964, it seemed for a long time that he had no more use for the spontaneous, personal lyricism that had balanced his public concerns; that the polemicist had taken over from the poet, deliberately and definitively. Apart from a...