/lit/ - Literature

>>13099458
To paraphrase what he's said about his own work, I'd say it's more about conveying the emotional shades and movements of the experience of an event as a whole, working more through the interplay of (indirectly) symbolic things and happenings. Anything involving a visual is essentially incidental to the overall thrust of the poem.

This one might do a better job of illustrating what I mean - all words connected to the visual play a purely functional role and are directed towards defining the symbolic object, nothing beyond that, no real attempt to create a sensual impression or "paint a picture".

Interesting that you mention Dickinson, she was among the writers Celan translated, I hadn't thought about it before but there are probably a few parallels you could draw between the two of them: collections of short, untitled poems grouped under general headings, use of the description of events in spheres of non-human entities in order to carry the significance of their poems, the treading of a line between lyric and aphorism, the branding of a unique and idiosyncratic rhythm and diction; all of which solidifies the sense of an author "world-building", engaging in a continuous, evolving work which accumulates in the reader's mind, which brings about the same effect you mention, in a way, of melding and taking on richer connotations as one becomes familiar with the author's particular universe.

It would be interesting to make a study of authors inheriting traits like these through the shifts of the years and centuries, and how a Modernist author can be reminiscent of a pre-Modernist one, but with the marks of chaos and deformity that follow from the massive changes in literature in the 20th century (not that those changes were necessarily bad, though).