Sonnets by Walter Benjamin (review)

The essayist and literary critic Walter Benjamin, is perhaps best known for his contributions to contemporary literary theory, especially through what is probably his most widely disseminated essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Over the course of his life's work, Benjamin elevated the practice of literary criticism to an artform. However, it has long been known that Benjamin, as a young man, had written poetry, and many of those poems were among the papers given to Georges Bataille for safekeeping in 1940, when Benjamin fled Paris with plans to flee Nazi-occupied Europe entirely, plans that ultimately ended tragically. For years, those poems could be accessed only by scholars, and only in their original German; this edition, by Fence Books, and translated by Carl Skoggard, represents their first appearance in English.

The 73 sonnets collected here were written in fits and starts over nearly a decade in response to the death of his friend, the poet Fritz Heinle. It was days after the outbreak of the First World War when Benjamin, still in his early-twenties, received an express letter from Heinle and his lover, Rika Seligson which read, "You will find us lying in the Meeting House." This was how Benjamin learned that his friends, despairing at the destructive course history appeared to be taking, had taken their own lives. Though little beyond hints and references survives of Heinle's poems, we know that Benjamin admired them and cherished his friendship with Heinle. Benjamin's sonnets, then, are poems of mourning, an outward expression of Benjamin's struggle with his grief. It seems apt, in many ways, that Benjamin would choose the sonnet form which, structurally, is built around the "turn" at the end, so that the poems are not so much depictions of mourning, but acts of mourning. Or, as Skoggard writes in his introduction, the poems "strike us as the expression of some hermetic thought process" [italics in the original].

Still, Benjamin's poems feel a little old fashioned. I don't know why that should be so surprising; after all, they were written over a hundred years ago—though seeped as they are in the juices of German Romanticism, they sometimes feel a hundred years older than that. Forward-thinking as Benjamin was as a critic, I guess it seems odd, at first anyway, that he would (appear to) be so back-ward-looking as a poet. Sonnet 18 opens like this:

Into his hands I wished to pour my hoursLike unto flower buds which should about him                bloom

And with the evergreen of silence did I thinkTo shade his brow to round his songs

As the poem continues, the speaker portrays himself as a knight in service of his friend's memory until, at poem's end, the speaker shifts from knight to singer, carrying on his friend's song, unworthy and indebted to the greater poet. Much of this, such as the nature imagery, the elevated diction, the poet-as-singer, is reminiscent of the German Romantic era, and yet a closer look reveals concerns that will be picked up later by the scholar/ thinker Benjamin. The concern with time jumps immediately to mind, but also in the sonnet's story, with the speaker carrying on the poet's song, there we can almost see Benjamin grappling with his role as cultural critic, singing the song of others, their words in his mouth, ultimately creating his own meaning ("My mouth his herald to sweeten what is bitter") from them. The question of worthiness he will perhaps leave behind as he leaves behind his youth, but the role of the critic, the philosopher, the historian, the archivist—and Benjamin was all of these—that will be something he will grapple with for years to come. The poem, too, is about remembrance, as are so many of the poems here, and this of course will become a major theme in Benjamin's critical work as well. (The big takeaway we're supposed to get from "The...