- List of poems by the most representative authors of expressionism
- To the Mute
- Passion
- Beautiful youth
- The ascension (of Christ)
- Garden love
- I'm sad
- Loneliness
- Man and woman walk through the barrack of the cancerous
- I would like
- Reflections
- The crutches
- Ode to the King of Harlem
- In you
- To beauty
- Ah your long lashes
- After the battle
- My blue piano
- To the end of the world
- Desperate
- September
- Patrol
- Clay poems
- The Panther
- Battle of Marne
- Senna-today
- Where do I approach, where do I land
- The poet speaks
- I kissed him goodbye
- Smile, breathe, walk solemn
- Oh poetry, in the lucid verse ...
- References
Expressionist poems are compositions that use literary resources typical of poetry, framed in the current called expressionism.
Expressionism is an artistic current that emerged in Germany in the early years of the 20th century and whose premise was to express the particular and internal vision of each artist, as opposed to Impressionism, a current that preceded it and whose basic principle was to reflect reality in the most reliable way possible.
-
Georg Trakl, author of Expressionism.
Expressionism sees a subjective reality and therefore deformed and capricious, where feelings are imposed on forms.
Other currents such as Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism were included within Expressionism, so it was a quite heterogeneous movement that revealed the time so convulsed that he lived.
Expressionist poetry also adopted this concept, resulting in pieces loaded with freedom, irrationality and rebellion both in the topics addressed –sickness, death, sex, misery-, as well as in their form and structure: without linguistic rules or with a deformation of them, although the rhyme and meter were maintained in most cases.
You may also be interested in this list of romantic poems or this list of surrealist poems.
List of poems by the most representative authors of expressionism
To the Mute
Ah, madness of the great city, at dusk
to dark nailed walls look at shapeless trees,
in a silver mask the evil genius observes,
light with a magnetic whip repels the stone night.
Ah, plunged are of bells at sunset.
Whore that gives birth to a dead child amid frozen tremors.
Wrath of God that furiously lashes the forehead of the possessed,
purple plague, hunger that shatters the green eyes.
Ah, the hideous laugh of gold.
Calmer humanity flows in a dark lair, quieter,
and in hard metals it forms the saving head.
Author: Georg Trakl. Translation of José Luis Arántegui
Passion
When Orpheus strikes the silver lyre
a dead man cries in the evening garden,
who are you lying under the tall trees?
The reed bed in autumn murmurs its lament.
The blue pool
is lost under the green of the trees
following the shadow of the sister;
dark love of a savage race,
fleeing the day on its golden wheels.
Serene night.
Under gloomy fir trees
two
petrified wolves mixed their blood in an embrace;
the cloud died on the golden path,
patience and silence of childhood.
The tender corpse appears
next to the pool of Triton
sleeping in its hyacinth hair.
May the cold head finally break!
For always a blue animal continues,
lurking in the gloom of the trees,
watching over these black roads,
moved by its nocturnal music,
by its sweet delirium;
or by the dark ecstasy
that vibrates its cadences
at the frozen feet of the penitent
in the city of stone.
Author: Georg Trakl. Helmut Pfeiffer's version
Beautiful youth
The mouth of a girl who had been in the reeds for a long time
seemed so rotten.
When they broke his chest, his esophagus was so leaky.
Finally, in a pergola under the diaphragm they
found a nest of small rats.
A little sister was lying dead.
The others fed on liver and kidney,
drank cold blood and spent
a beautiful youth here.
And beautiful and fast, death surprised them: they were
all thrown into the water.
Oh, how the little snouts screamed!
Author: Gottfried Benn
The ascension (of Christ)
He tightened his belt until it was tight.
Its bare frame of bones creaked. In the side the wound.
He coughed up bloody drool. It flamed over her battered hair.
A crown of thorns of light. And always curious dogs.
The disciples sniffed around. It hit his chest like a gong.
For the second time long drops of blood shot,
And then the miracle came. The ceiling of the sky
opened lemon color. A gale howled on high trumpets.
He, however, ascended. Meter after meter in the
Espacio gap. The getas paled in profound astonishment.
From below they could only see the soles of his sweaty feet.
Author: Wilhelm Klemm. Version by Jorge Luis Borges
Garden love
When you arise
your body a clear temple blooms
My arms sink like a people that prays
and they lift you up from twilight
to the stars that around the bosom of the Lord
they chain
Thus our hours weave garlands around love
and your long gazes from the lands of the South
they make me sick to your soul
and I sink
and I drink you
and I find a drop of eternity in the sea of your blood.
Author: Kurt Heynicke. Version by Jorge Luis Borges
I'm sad
Your kisses darken, on my mouth.
You do not love me anymore.
And how did you come!
Blue because of paradise;
Around your sweetest sources
My heart fluttered.
Now I want to make him up,
Just like prostitutes
Color the withered rose on their hips red.
Our eyes are half closed,
Like a dying sky
The moon has aged.
The night will no longer wake up.
You hardly remember me.
Where will I go with my heart?
Author: Else Lasker-Schüler
Sonia Almau's version
Loneliness
Solitude is like the rain,
which rises from the sea and moves towards the night.
From distant and lost plains it
rises to the sky, which always picks it up.
And only from the sky falls into the city.
It is like a rain in indecisive hours
when all the paths point towards the day
and when the bodies, which found nothing,
turn away from each other, disappointed and sad;
and when beings who mutually hate each other
must sleep together in the same bed.
So loneliness leaves with the rivers…
Author: Rainer María Rilke
Man and woman walk through the barrack of the cancerous
The man:
In this row destroyed laps,
in this other destroyed breasts.
Bed sucks next to bed. The nurses take turns every hour.
Come, lift this blanket without fear.
Look, this lump of fat and rotten moods, it
was once important to a man
and it was also called homeland and delirium.
Come look at these scars on the chest.
Do you feel the rosary of soft knots?
Play without fear. The meat is soft and does not hurt.
This woman bleeds like she has thirty bodies.
No human being has so much blood. She was first cut off
a child from her sick lap.
They let them sleep. Day and night. -To the new ones
they are told: here the dream is healing. Only on Sundays,
for visits, they are left awake for a while.
Little food is still consumed. The backs
are full of wounds. Look at the flies. Sometimes
a nurse washes them. How the banks are washed.
Here the tilled field swells around each bed.
Meat becomes plain. Fire is lost.
Humor prepares to run. Earth calls.
Author: Gottfried Benn
I would like
I would like to drink the water
from all the springs,
quenching all my thirst,
becoming a nayáde.
Know all the winds,
furrow all the roads,
suppressing my ignorance
for the neoteric of time.
Novar all my anxiety
for quiet harmony
and feel integrity
even though there is nothing left.
I would like to see at night,
not long for a new day,
soak up myself in the waste
of well-being and joy.
And if being I don't know anything
Author: Nely García
Reflections
I am born, I live, I die, repeated absurdity in this uncertain world.
The route is marked in the fleeting moment
of an ignored night.
Moments of end and dawn are interwoven
walking in darkness along the announced route.
Some daydream.
Others live laments.
Some take refuge in discovering silences
that they can teach you the unity of the times,
the why? Of the life, the why? Of the dead.
With these concerns some take for granted
the value of love, and burned by it
they rush to live with the stillness, or the wind.
Dreamed privilege !, soaking the feelings of few graceful
who enjoy joyful, simplicity and success!
Author: Nely García
The crutches
For seven years I could not take a step.
When i went to the doctor
He asked me: Why are you wearing crutches?
Because I'm crippled, I replied.
It is not strange, he said:
Try walking. Are those junk
those that prevent you from walking.
Come on, dare, crawl on all fours!
Laughing like a monster
took away my beautiful crutches, broke them on my back without stopping laughing, and threw them into the fire.
Now I am cured. I'm going.
A laugh healed me.
Only sometimes when I see sticks
I walk a little worse for a few hours.
Author: Bertolt Brecht
Ode to the King of Harlem
With a spoon
gouged out the eyes of crocodiles
and beat the butt of monkeys.
With a spoon.
Always fire slept in the flints
and the drunken anise beetles
they forgot the moss of the villages.
That old man covered in mushrooms
I went to the place where the blacks cried
while crunching the king's spoon
and the tanks of rotten water arrived.
The roses fled along the edges
of the last curves of the air, and in the piles of saffron
the children crushed little squirrels
with a blush of stained frenzy.
Bridges must be crossed
and get to the black blush
so that the lung perfume
hit our temples with her dress
of hot pineapple.
It is necessary to kill
to the blond liquor seller, to all the friends of the apple and the sand, and it is necessary to give with clenched fists
to the little beans that tremble full of bubbles, For the king of Harlem to sing with his crowd, for alligators to sleep in long lines
under the asbestos of the moon, and so that no one doubts the infinite beauty
of feather dusters, graters, coppers and kitchen pans.
Oh Harlem! Oh Harlem! Oh Harlem!
There is no anguish comparable to your oppressed reds, to your trembling blood within the dark eclipse,
to your deaf-mute garnet violence in the gloom, your great prisoner king in a janitor outfit!
Author: Federico García Lorca
In you
You want to flee from yourself, escape towards the far away, the past annihilates, new currents lead you -
and you find the return deeper in yourself.
Desecration of you came and cloistered bliss.
Now you feel your heart serving destiny, so close to you, suffering for all the loyal stars engaged.
Author: Ernst Stadler
To beauty
So we have pursued your miracles
like children who drunk from sunlight
a smile on the mouth full of sweet fears
and totally immersed in the haven of golden light
Twilights came running out of the portals of dawn.
Far away is the great city drowning in smoke, shivering, the night rises fresh from brown depths.
Now they make the burning cheeks tremble
in wet leaves that drip from darkness
and his hands full of longing tempt
on the last glow of the summer day
that behind the red forests disappeared -
her silent crying swims and dies in darkness.
Author: Ernst Stadler
Ah your long lashes
Ah, your long lashes,
the dark water in your eyes.
Let me sink into them,
descend to the bottom.
As the miner descends to the depths
and a very dim lamp oscillates
over the door of the mine,
in the shady wall, so I go down
to forget on your breast
how much rumbles above,
day, torment, radiance.
Grows together in the fields,
where the wind resides, with intoxication of harvest,
the tall delicate hawthorn
Against the blue sky.
Give me your hand,
and let us unite growing,
prey to every wind,
flight of solitary birds.
that in summer we listen to
the muffled organ of the storms,
that we bathe in the autumn light
on the shore of blue days.
Sometime we will go to look
at the edge of a dark well,
we will look at the bottom of the silence
and we will look for our love.
Or we will leave the shadow
of the golden forests
to enter, large, in some twilight
that gently touches your forehead.
Divine sadness,
wing of eternal love,
raise your jug
and drink from this dream.
Once we reach the end
where the sea of yellow spots
quietly invades the
September Bay, we will
rest in the house
where the flowers are scarce,
while among the rocks
a wind trembles as it sings.
But from the white poplar tree
that rises towards the blue
a blackened leaf falls
to rest on your neck.
Author: Georg Heym
After the battle
In the fields lie cramped corpses,
on the green border, on flowers, their beds.
Lost weapons, rodless wheels,
and steel frames turned inside out.
Many puddles smoke with fumes of blood
that cover the brown battlefield black and red.
And the belly of
dead horses swells whitish, their legs extended in the dawn.
In the cold wind the crying
of the dying is still frozen, and through the east door
a pale light appears, a green glow,
the diluted ribbon of a fleeting dawn.
Author: Georg Heym
My blue piano
I have a blue piano at home
Although I don't know any notes.
It's in the shadow of the basement door,
Since the world got rude.
They play four star hands
-The woman-moon sang in the boat-,
Now the rats dance on the keyboard.
Broken is the top of the piano…
I cry to the blue dead woman.
Ah, dear angels, open
me -I ate the sour bread-
To me alive the door of heaven-
Even against the forbidden.
Author: Else Lasker Schüller. Translation by Sonia Almau.
To the end of the world
The bourgeoisie blows the hat off his sharp head.
Through the air there is like a resounding of screams.
Shingles fall apart, shatter
and on the coasts - it reads - the tide rises incessantly and rough.
The storm has come; the seas jump light
over the land until the levees break.
Almost all of them have colds.
Iron railings fall from the bridges.
Author: Jacob Van Hoddis. Translation of Antonio Méndez Rubio
Desperate
There rumbles a strident stone
night grained glass
times stop
I petrify myself.
I forget ,
you glaze away
!
Author: August Stramm
September
In the dark valleys
before dawn
in all the mountains
and valleys deserted
fields hungry
muddy villas
villages
cities
courtyards
huts and slums
in factories, in warehouses, in stations
in the barn
on farms
and in mills
in
headquarters electrical
establishments
on the streets and on the curves
up
between ravines, cliffs, peaks and hills sloping
field margins in the bleakest places and deserts in the yellow autumn forests on the stones in the water in the torbid eddies in the meadows gardens fields vineyards in the shepherds' shelters among bushes burning stubble swamps flowers with thorns: ragged muddy rags starving for numb faces from work emancipated from the heat and cold hardened deformed
cripples
Retintos
black
barefoot
tortured
ordinary
wild
rabid
rabid
- without roses
without chants
without marches and drums
without clarinets, eardrums and organs,
without trombones, trumpets and cornets:
tattered sacks on the shoulder,
rather shiny swords -
ordinary clothes in hand
beggars with sticks
with sticks
spikes
splinters
plows
axes
hawks
sunflowers
- old and young -
all rush, from everywhere
- like a herd of blind beasts
in maddening race to pounce,
a few glances
of furious bulls -
with
howling shouts
(behind them - the night time - petrified)
flew, advancing
in
unstoppable disorder
formidable
sublime:
THE PEOPLE!
Author: Geo Milev. Translation by Pablo Neruda.
Patrol
The stones harass the
window laugh ironically betrayal
branches strangle
mountains bushes leaf with crackle
resound
death.
Author: August Stramm
Clay poems
The breeze confuses the pages
of the newspaper of the citizen,
who, offended, complains
to the neighbor of the time.
His indignation is
blown away by the wind. His thick eyebrows
full of scowling hairs
look like ruffled screams.
The gale rips tiles
from village houses,
which fall to the ground and explode,
spraying the ground with red fumes.
On the coast the storm stars
gray and blue waves,
but the day promises sun and heat
(it is true, the newspapers say).
The storm arrives, the
raging waters assault the land
and make the rocks tremble,
dwarfed by the blue mountain.
The gray sky spits rain,
the gray street is flooded with grief,
Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen
An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken. (The storm is here, the raging waters
storm the land to crush thick dikes.)
The Panther
His gaze, tired of seeing
the bars go by, no longer holds anything else.
He believes that the world is made
of thousands of bars and, beyond that, nothingness.
With his soft walk, flexible and strong steps, he
turns around in a tight circle;
like a dance of forces around a center
in which, alert, resides an imposing will.
Sometimes the curtain on his eyelids rises,
speechless. An image travels inward,
runs through the tense calm of her limbs
and, when it falls into her heart, melts and vanishes.
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke
Battle of Marne
Slowly the stones begin to move and speak.
Herbs go numb to green metal. The forests,
Low, hermetic hiding places, devour distant columns.
The sky, the whitewashed secret, threatens resale
Two colossal hours unwind in minutes.
The empty horizon swells steep.
My heart is as big as Germany and France together,
Pierced by all the bullets in the world.
The drums raise their lion voice six times into the interior of the country. The grenades howl.
Silence. In the distance the fire of the infantry boils.
Days, whole weeks.
Author: Wilhelm Klemm
Senna-today
Since you're buried on the hill
the land is sweet.
And wherever I go on tiptoe, I walk on pure paths.
Oh the roses of your blood
sweetly impregnate death.
I'm not afraid anymore
to the death.
I already flourish on your grave, with bindweed flowers.
Your lips always called me.
Now my name does not know how to return.
Every shovelful of dirt that I hid
he buried me too.
Therefore, the night is always with me, and the stars, just at twilight.
And our friends don't understand me anymore
because I am a stranger.
But you are at the gates of the most silent city, and you wait for me, oh angel!
Author: Albert Ehrenstein
Where do I approach, where do I land
Where do I approach, where do I land, there, in the shade and in the sand
they will join me
and I will rejoice, tied with the bow of shadow!
Author: Hugo von Hofmannsthal
The poet speaks
The poet speaks:
Not towards the suns of the premature journey, not to the lands of cloudy afternoons, your children, neither loud nor silent, yes, it is hardly recognized, in what mysterious way
the life to the dream we snatch
and to him with a quiet vine-garland
from the spring of our garden binds us.
Author: Hugo von Hofmannsthal
I kissed him goodbye
Kissed him goodbye
And I still nervously held your hand
I warn you over and over again:
Beware of this and that
man is mute.
WHEN is it that the whistle, the whistle finally blows?
I feel like I'll never see you in this world again.
And I say simple words - I don't understand.
The man is stupid.
I know that if I lost you
I'd be dead, dead, dead, dead.
And still, he wanted to run away.
My God, how do I fancy a cigarette!
the man is stupid.
Was gone
I for me, lost in the streets and drowned by tears, I look around me, confused.
Because not even tears can tell
what we really mean.
Author: Franz Werfel
Smile, breathe, walk solemn
You create, carry, carry
The thousand waters of the smile in your hand.
Smile, blessed moisture stretches
All over the face.
The smile is not a wrinkle
The smile is the essence of light.
Light filters through the spaces, but not yet
it is.
The light is not the sun.
Only on the human face
Light is born as a smile.
Of those sonorous gates light and immortal
From the gates of the eyes for the first time
Spring sprouted, celestial foam, The never burning flame of the smile.
In the rainy flame of the smile the withered hand rinses, You create, carry, carry.
Author: Franz Werfel
Oh poetry, in the lucid verse…
Oh poetry, in the lucid verse
that the anxiety of spring exalts,
that the victory of summer assails,
that hopes in the eye of heaven flames,
that joy in the heart of the earth conflagrates,
oh poetry, in the livid verse
that mud of autumn splashes,
that breaks winter icicles,
that splashes poison in the eye of the sky,
that squeezes wounds in the heart of the earth,
oh poetry, in the inviolable verse you
squeeze the forms that within
malvivas fainted in the ephemeral
cowardly gesture, in the
breathless air, in the
indefinite and deserted passage
of the scattered dream,
in the pleasureless orgy
of the drunken fantasy;
and while you get up to remain silent
about the hubbub of those who read and write,
about the malice of those who profit and vary,
about the sadness of those who suffer and blind,
you are the hubbub and malice and sadness,
but you are the brass band
that beats the I walk,
but you are the joy
that encourages the neighbor,
but you are the certainty
of the great destiny,
oh poetry of manure and flowers,
terror of life, presence of God,
oh dead and reborn
citizen of the world in chains!
Author: Clemente Rebora. Translation by Javier Sologuren.
References
- Vintila Horia (1989). Introduction to 20th century literature. Editorial Andrés Bello, Chile.
- Poems by Georg Trakl. Recovered from saltana.org
- Else Lasker-Schüler. Recovered from amediavoz.com
- Rainer Maria Rilke. Recovered from trianarts.com and davidzuker.com
- The Assumption (of Christ). Recovered from poemas.nexos.xom.mx
- Carlos Garcia. Borges and Espressionism: Kurt Heynicke. Recovered from Borges.pitt.edu
- Four poems by Gottfried Benn. Recovered from digopalabratxt.com
- Expressionism. Recovered from es.wikipedia.org.