Macro Trakl

Scholarship on Georg Trakl (1887–1914) has to date largely concerned itself with the finer details of his famously enigmatic poetic expression, especially his imagery and diction, rather than the artistry underlying larger compositional units such as poems, cycles, and collections. This study starts to redress the balance by taking a wide‐angled view of the shape and structure of his second and final published collection Sebastian im Traum (1915). In particular, it makes the case that by dividing the collection into five parts, Trakl was adapting and magnifying a format with which he had already achieved success – in the single longest lyric he ever wrote: ‘Helian’, from his previous collection Gedichte (1913). By cross‐reading each part of ‘Helian’ with the corresponding cycle from Sebastian im Traum , it shows that the parallels extend beyond the merely formal consideration of a fivefold division to a deeper level of thematic organisation, the analysis of which brings essential elements of Trakl's view of the world and the poet's place within it into sharper focus

Art · Diction · Focus (optics · Linguistics · Literature · Parallels · Poetry · Political science · Reading (process · Redress · Scholarship · Engineering · German Literature and Culture Studies · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy · Philosophy and Historical Thought