The Cambridge introduction to German poetry /

For all who enjoy the pleasures of German poetry, Ryan's book is highly recommended for its scholarship and its practicality. In many ways, it is a how-to-book presented at a very sophisticated level. Ryan (Harvard Univ.) offers a close reading that accomplishes many things: she places the text in its historic setting and cultural period, uses biography when necessary, identifies the poetic form, attends to the speaker, recognizes the level of diction and the complications of syntax, explores the imagery, and notes the meter and its variations. The author masterfully demonstrates her method on canonical poems from several periods: Middle High German, the Reformation, the Baroque, the classical period, Romanticism, modernism, poetry after Auschwitz, and German unification. Organizing the chapters chronologically, she addresses the cultural influence of tradition on following generations. Ryan presents the poems in their original language (even those written prior to the standardization of German) and provides each one with a prose translation in English. But despite the excellent translations, her introduction requires a high degree of familiarity with German. The book concludes with a section on metrics, a glossary of technical terms, a tailored bibliography for each chapter, and a very useful index. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. R. C. Conard University of Dayton