SOURCE: "Nelly Sachs: A Characterization," in Dimension, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1968, pp. 377-81.

In the following essay, Kahn explores Sachs's unique place among modern poets.

In its treatment of recent poetry literary history likes to employ the term "modern" to emphasize the deep gulf that separates the old and the new trends in the development of the genre. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, Garcia Lorca are "modern" poets, whereas Goethe and the Romantics belong to the old tradition.

Nelly Sachs, who was born in Berlin in 1891 and is now living in Stockholm, in many ways is a "modern" poet. She, too, is lonely and fearful in an apparently empty and chaotic world; she, too, in her work destroys reality and the logical and effective order of normal existence; she, too, increasingly breaks down the form of her poem, and operates instead with the irrational force of the word; she...