Not Orpheus: Selected Poems

This work is an anthology of the poems of Ernst Meister, described by Walter Jens as the tenderest epic poet imaginable. An inveterate outsider, from the start he was out of step, publishing his first book of what a reviewer called Kandinsky poetry months before the Nazis seized power. He might have been branded a degenerate poet with fatal consequences. After World War II, Meister re-emerged writing runic verse in the teeth of a coloquial, Brechtian orthoxoy which emphasized relevance and political definition. He defied the trends of the 1960s and early 1970s, refusing to promote his work and prefering to refine and deepen his explorations. His philosophical concerns are never abstract - the challenges of Nietzsche, are urgently real to him. He took his engagement with them more seriously than his place in poetic history. Meister was awarded Germany’s foremost literary prize, the Georg-Buchner-Preis, posthumously in 1979.