Die späten Gedichte.

by Hermann Hesse

=The late poems

Genres: Poetry

50 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.

Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game , which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society.

In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind , first great novel of Hesse.

Throughout Germany, people named many schools. In 1964, people founded the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis, awarded biennially, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of work of Hesse to a foreign language. The city of Karlsruhe, Germany, also associates a Hermann Hesse prize.

Reviews

[Christina Mann · Rating 4 out of 5]

vielleicht muss ich meine meinung zu hermann hesse nochmal überdenken, da waren echt paar banger dabei

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slim volume, first published in 1963, collects 37 poems Hesse wrote between 1944, when he was sixty-seven, and 1962. The final poem is dated August 8, the day before Hesse died at eighty-five. They are, for the most part, firmly in the tradition of Romantic landscape poems. They convey the melancholy of the change of seasons as objective correlatives of an observer who sees his own transience reflected. It surprises me that Hesse, whose prose works include the phantasmagoria of Steppenwolf and whose life was shaken by spiritual and psychological crises, should write such seemingly simple lyrics.
The best to me is one in which the object to which the observer feels kinship is not natural but a weathered Buddha statue. Thirteen of its fourteen lines are perfect, but then Hesse ruins the effect by restating the obvious in the last line: “Bild allen Wandels in der ewigen Einheit.” He’d made that point effectively and did not need to spell it out.
Then something happens in the final poems: the form loosens while the diction tightens. Two of these appear in more than one version, and a comparison of the first draft and the revision of one of them, “Einst vor tausend Jahren,” demonstrates what Hesse was capable of.
Overall, these poems remind me more of Hesse’s watercolors than the best of his prose. They seem the fruit of hours of relaxation, contemplating the beauty surrounding him in his refuge above Lake Lugano. I don’t begrudge him those hours.