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Selected Poems of Maria Luise Weissmann (Neglected Voices)

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.