“The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi’s Poetic Emergence

Extensive criticism documents Primo Levi’s life as a survivor and work as a chemist but no serious attention has been paid to his poetry—except in relation to the poems about Auschwitz. As his lyric enterprise moves beyond the Shoah, Levi describes the connection between science and writing and how that liaison led him to a poetic alongside his Jewish roots and inside the European cultural tradition. When he saw in Hiroshima the disturbing interface between the history of war and the history of poetry, he challenged that heritage (as did other modernist poets to whom he might be compared) to find a voice of his own.