SOURCE: “Drowning as One of the Fine Arts,” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 1981, pp. 91-109.

In the following essay about Enzensberger's Der Untergang der Titanic (The Sinking of the Titanic) West analyzes Enzensberger's evocation of the experience aboard the sinking ship and the passengers' final moments before death.

I

For whom is the Titanic still not going down? Not as often as the sun, but several times a year, in the furry hinterland of sleep, tweaked into mind by A Night to Remember (1958) or a television revival, and embellished with our own private images of airships foundering in flames, submarines rusting on the ocean bottom (remember the Thetis), airplanes that come apart upside down in flight long enough for photographers to snap the obscenity, and trains that race out of control to the terminal and smash clean through it. Our highly developed sense of...