Truth of Poetry

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924, and came to Britain as a child. He has taught widely in America and Britain and is the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. His awards include the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for services to German literature. Anvil publishes several of his translations, including editions of Goethe, Holderlin, Rilke and Poems of Paul Celan', which received the EC's European Translation Prize in 1990. His poem-sequence Late' appeared in 1997. He died in 2007.

'This is virtually an encyclopaedia of modern poetry; as such it has, I think, no rival, simply because there is no other critic with the linguistic and technical knowledge to have attempted it. And it is not merely a work which provides useful and otherwise inaccessible information on so many poets of importance (in half a dozen languages); it also offers a theory of modern poetry' - Frank Kermode'There cannot be many readers of poetry with Mr Hamburger's range: he is at home in French, German, English, Italian and Spanish. His knowledge extends to Portuguese and, via translations at least, to Polish and Russian verse... Used simply as a guide to the most important European and American poetry of the period from the 1880s to the present, this book has great value' - George Steiner, Sunday Times'Mr Hamburger... is not only a poet and critic but scholar as well, and these three often warring pursuits seem in him to live in harmony' - Times Literary Supplement'We have, in 'The Truth of Poetry', a profound contribution to modern aesthetics and, as an incidental bonus, a critical introduction to twentieth-century world poetry' - Times Educational Supplement