SOURCE: "'Landschaft aus Schreien': the Shackled Leaps of Nelly Sachs," in Bucknell Review, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Spring, 1973, pp. 43-62.

In the following essay, Bosmajian presents a deep analysis of "Landschaft aus Schreien," emphasizing Sachs's use of imagery and symbolism.

Nelly Sachs's poems disprove and confirm Theodor Adorno's statement that "after Auschwitz we cannot write poetry." The conjunction of Auschwitz and poetry seems an obscenity, for what has the cruel reality of the camp to do with lyricism?

The poems of Nelly Sachs do not reproduce that reality with documentary exactness; they fail to reveal the essence of evil. This failing is not new, for the makers of verbal universes have always revealed little about the essences with which they have concerned themselves. Dante envisioned the essence of evil as a corporeal and grotesque image of a trinity immobilized in the icy pit of hell, and he could do...