SOURCE: A review of Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, in Poetry, Vol. C, No. 5, August, 1962, pp. 322-24.

In the following excerpt, the reviewer points out the singular appeal of Trakl's abstract poetry, commenting also on Bly's and Wright's translations.

George Trakl died young, and his poems are the work of a young poet; they combine the social concern of Auden with the vague romanticism of unresolved emotion we find in so much of Goethe—there is a spectral quality to them that is all their own. They are the immediate violent reaction of the youthful heart to the deep numbness it feels in the face of the brutality and injustice of the world. In them there is the refuge taken in nature, the expression of our situation in terms of her changes, a violence done to her out of our own anger, that the still unclarified mind caught...