Georg Trakl

[e_dog]

poet. Austrian 1887-1914.

sort of a German Rimbaud with war trauma.

[e_dog]

medic in the army on the eastern front. overwhelmed by task of caring for the battle-wounded in hospital. overdosed on cocaine, perhaps intentionally. before that, tho, he penned a poem on the battle at Grodek, which ends:

Oh proud sorrow! on the brass altars
the hot flame of spirit feeds
a tremendous pain,
the unborn grandsons.

[e_dog]

near the end of a lecture on speech, after thoroughly misinterpreting a poem by Trakl as symbolic for a bizarre metaphysical theory, Heidegger presents the following, somewhat Nietzschean, statement:

'Poetry is not a higher mode of everyday language; rather, everyday language is a forgotten, used up poem.'

interestingly, Wittgenstein was a benefactor to both Trakl and Rilke, although Ludwig apparently disliked the poetry of the latter. Of the former's poetry, however, he is reported to have said: 'I don't understand it, but it has the tone of genius.'

Wittgenstein survived the Great War by writing a treatise on logic, which however also contained sentences like "Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is" and "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)"

[gypsyjoker]

Evening melancholy
Judih posted that somewhere, the lastime I saw my copy of trakl's poetry was in a laundromat in Nashville. Went back in to find a guy hold my jeans up to his waist to see if they would fit, save the jeans but found the book was missing. His horror of war, which he called a collasal failure of the imagination.

[e_dog]

there's a book by Marie Januus Currik about Trakl written in i believe the '70s.

pretty interesting, a psychoanalytic take, comparing the poet's creativity and psychosis. too speculative, though in her diagnoses, methinks she downplays the import of his drug use and the war era itself, focusing on his psychology as such.