Poems

Not many American readers seem to be aware that Hermann Hesse, author of the epic novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, among many others, also wrote poetry, the best of which the poet James Wright has translated and included in this book. This is a special volume—filled with short, direct poems about love, death, loneliness, the seasons—that is imbued with some of the imagery and feeling of Hesse's novels but that has a clarity and resonance all its own, a sense of longing for love and for home that is both deceptively simple and deeply moving.

 

 

 

Contents

 

Translator's Note

 

I Know, You Walk

Across the Fields

Elizabeth

Ravenna (1)

Ravenna (2)

Lonesome Night

A Swarm of Gnats

The Poet

Mountains at Night

At Night on the High Seas

To a Chinese Girl Singing

Departure from the Jungle

Evil Time

On a Journey

Night

Destiny

Ode to Hölderlin

Childhood

Lying in the Grass

How Heavy the Days . . .

In a Collection of Egyptian Sculptures

Without You

The First Flowers

Spring Day

Holiday Music in the Evening

Thinking of a Friend at Night

Autumn Day

To Children

Flowers, Too

Uneasiness in the Night

All Deaths

Praise

"Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Gide, Thomas Mann rightly called Hesse a master . . . His fiction achieves the glorious anachronism of art: created in the past, it speaks to us in the present. It glorifies the strategies of attempting to become a full human being and it celebrates the nobility of failure."—Webster Schott, Life

 

"Hesse is  a writer of suggestion, of nuance, of spiritual intimation."—The Christian Science Monitor

 

"[Hesse was] one of the defining spirits of our century."—Ralph Freedman, Princeton University

About the Author(s)

Hermann Hesse

Herman Hesse (1877-1962) was a German poet and novelist. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

photo: ©Suhrkamp Verlag

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