Reading Colour

Rey Conquer is Stipendiary Lecturer in German at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

• Contents: George and Surfaces – Rilke and Balance – Kandinsky’s Red Corners: Wandering in the Poem – Lasker-Schüler’s Blue Rooms: An Experiment in Reading

«Reading Colour is a hugely ambitious project: in asking why and how poetswrite colour, Rey Conquer offers a tour de force of close reading in earlytwentieth–century poetry, but also tells a fascinating story about how weread poetry – indeed, how we read. Full of fascinating insights and brilliantclose readings – from George’s surfaces to Rilke’s balance, Kandinsky’s redcorners and Lasker-Schüler’s blue rooms – this is a stunning guide to the innerarchitecture of the poem from the first to the last gorgeously written page.»(Karen Leeder, Professor of Modern German Literature, Fellow of New College, Oxford)«Rey Conquer colours the reading and writing of poetry with vivid specificity.Again and again the life of colour words in poems is shown to reveal notonly how the visual fares in linguistic refraction, but also poetological truthsconcerning both modernism and the universal condition of poetic language.»(Michael Minden, Jesus College, Cambridge)«Rey Conquer’s Reading Colour is a unique and original study of the ways four ofthe twentieth-century’s most gifted and influential German-speaking poets andartists (Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky, and Else Lasker-Schüler) thought about – and through – colour in their verse. This lucid andpersuasive monograph encourages us to rethink and reimagine (their) poetryin new and exciting ways.» (Nicholas Martin, Director of the Institute for German Studies, University of Birmingham)