8 Expressionist Poems of Great Authors

The Expressionist poems Are compositions that use literary resources characteristic of poetry, framed in the current denominated Expressionism.

Expressionism is an artistic movement that emerged in Germany in the early years of the twentieth century and whose premise was to express the individual and internal vision of each artist, as opposed to Impressionism, which preceded it and which had as a basic principle to reflect reality In the most reliable way possible.

Poems of expressionism Georg Trakl, author of Expressionism.

Expressionism sees a subjective and therefore deformed and capricious reality, where the feelings are imposed before the forms.

Expressionism included other currents such as Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism, so it was a rather heterogeneous movement that showed the time so convulsed that he had to live.

Expressionist poetry also adopted this concept, resulting in pieces loaded with freedom, irrationality and rebellion both in the subjects addressed - illness, death, sex, misery - as well as in its form and structure: without linguistic rules or with A deformation of them, although the rhyme and the metric were maintained in the majority of the cases.

8 Poems of the most representative authors of Expressionism

Here are 8 poems by the best known authors of the German expressionist movement.

1- To the Mute

Ah, madness of the great city, at dusk
To obscure dark walls,
In silver mask the evil genius observes,
Light with magnetic whip repels stone night.
Ah, sunken are bells in the twilight.

Bitch that shines like a dead child among ice cream.
Wrath of God that ravishes the forehead of the possessed,
Purple plague, hunger that breaks in shreds green eyes.
Ah, the horrible laughter of gold.

More calm mana in dark den more quiet mankind,
And in hard metals it forms the saving head.

Author: Georg Trakl. Translation by José Luis Arántegui

2 - Passion

When Orpheus plays the silver lyre
Cries a dead in the garden of the afternoon,
Who are you who lie under the high trees?
His mourning mourns the canefield in autumn.

The blue pond
Is lost under the green of the trees
Following the shadow of the sister;
Dark love of a wild breed,
Who flees the day in his golden wheels.
Serene night

Under shady spruce
They mixed their blood two wolves
Petrified in a hug;
The cloud died on the golden path,
Patience and silence of childhood.

The tender corpse appears
Next to the pond of Tritón
Sleeping in his hair of hyacinth.
At last break the cold head!

For a blue animal always proceeds,
Lurking in the shadows of the trees,
Guarding these black roads,
Touched by his nocturnal music,
For his sweet delirium;
Or by the dark ecstasy
That vibrates its cadences
To the icy feet of the penitent
In the city of stone.

Author: Georg Trakl. Version by Helmut Pfeiffer

Beautiful youth

The mouth of a girl who had long been among the reeds
It looked so rotten.
When his chest was broken, the esophagus was so pierced.
Finally, in a pergola under the diaphragm
They found a nest of little rats.
A little sister lay dead.
The others fed on the liver and kidney,
They drank their cold blood and went here
A beautiful youth.
And beautiful and quick death surprised them:
All of them cast into the water.
Oh, how the little snouts screamed!

Author: Gottfried Benn

4- Ascension (of Christ)

He tightened his belt until he tightened his grip.
Its bare skeleton of bones creaked. In the side the wound.
He coughed bloody dribble. It flickered over his martyred hair.
A crown of thorns of light. And dogs always curious.
The disciples were snooping around. He struck his chest like a gong.
For the second time they shot blood drops,
And then came the miracle. The sky ceiling
It opened lemon-colored. A gale howled in the high trumpets.
He, however, ascended. Metro after meter in the gap
Space. The Getas paled in deep astonishment.
From below they could only see the soles of her feet sweating.

Author: Wilhelm Klemm. Version by Jorge Luis Borges

5- Garden love

When you arise

Your body a clear temple flowers

My arms sink like a people praying

And they raise you from the twilight

Even to the stars that round about the Lord's breast

They are chained

So around love knit garlands our hours

And your long glances of the lands of the South

I am praying to your soul

And I go down

And I drink you

And find a drop of eternity in the sea of your blood.

Author: Kurt Heynicke. Version by Jorge Luis Borges

I'm sad

Your kisses darken, over my mouth.
You do not love me anymore.
And how you came!
Blue because of paradise;
Around your sweetest sources
It fluttered my heart.
Now I want to make up,
Same as prostitutes
Color red with the withered rose of her hips.
Our eyes are narrowed,
Like dying sky
The moon has aged.
The night will not wake up.

You barely remember me.
Where will I go with my heart?

Author: Else Lasker-Schüler

Version by Sonia Almau

7- Soledad

Loneliness is like rain,
That rises from the sea and advances towards the night.
Of distant and lost plains
It goes up to the sky, which always picks it up.
And only from the sky falls in the city.

It's like a rain at undecided hours
When all the paths point to the day
And when the bodies, which found nothing,
They depart from each other, disappointed and sad;
And when beings who mutually hate each other
They must sleep together in the same bed.

Then the loneliness goes with the rivers...

Author: Rainer María Rilke

8- Man and woman walk through the tent of the cancerous

The man:
In this row, broken laps,
In this other breasts destroyed.
Bed stinks by the bed. Nurses take turns every hour.
Come, lift this blanket without fear.
Look, this lump of grease and rotten humors,
Was once important to a man
And it was also called homeland and delirium.
Come, look at these scars on the chest.
Do you feel the rosary of soft knots?
Touch without fear. The meat is soft and does not hurt.
This woman bleeds as if she had thirty bodies.
No human being has so much blood. This one was first cut off
A child of the sick lap.
They let them sleep. Day and night. -To the new
They are told: here the dream is healing. Only on Sundays,
For the visits, they are left awake awhile.
There is little food that is still consumed. The backs
They are full of wounds. Look at the flies. Sometimes
They are washed by a nurse. How banks are washed.
Here the tilled field swells around each bed.
Meat becomes plain. Fire is lost.
Humor is about to run. Earth called.