Selected Poems of Maria Luise Weissmann

When Munich-based poet Maria Luise Weissmann (1899-1929) died unexpectedly at the age of thirty, her peers on the German literary scene knew that the world had lost a poet of great promise-and one whose passing gave as much cause for grief, Otto Heuschele noted, as the recent death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Influenced by Hofmannsthal and Rilke both, Weissmann spoke with a voice that also recalled-in its formal restraint yet vulnerable candor-that of her American contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay, though one distinctively her own. Her subjects were wide-ranging-saints, prophets, animals wild and domestic, characters from classic literature such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, the modern city, nature, and love-and her treatment of them was, by turns, solemn, witty, and profound. This volume provides, for the very first time, a substantial offering of her poems in an English version.