"AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD": POETRY AND THE HOLOCAUST

Even in the mid-1930s, years before Hitler's genocidal expansionism blossomed into concentration camps, gas chambers, orchestrated massacres, mass graves, and crematoria, what we now call "Holocaust poems" had begun to appear. But after seven decades of Holocaust poetry, the first book-length study of the genre—Susan Gubar's Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew—has only recently been published. Why have critics shied from the subject? Holocaust poems are revised, edited, rejected, and otherwise subjected to critical judgment. But as the oxymoron "good Holocaust poetry" suggests, when it comes to Holocaust poems, it is difficult to judge the form (good poetry) without also appearing to judge the content (good Holocaust?). As a result, in discussions of Holocaust poetry, the message tends to render the medium moot—or at least to intimidate participants into noncommittal tact. And even if one could distinguish between form and content—a problematic undertaking, as we shall see—the act of criticizing Holocaust poetry is morally suspect. When a poem memorializes a catastrophe of unheard-of proportions, criticism seems like avoidance of the content; one shouldn't dither over diction when confronting the crematoria. Under such conditions, it isn't surprising that "powerful"—an adjective that pays homage to the content while evading questions of aesthetics—is the most popular critical epithet for Holocaust poetry, whether penned by grade schoolers or by Nobel laureates.

But the difficulty of adopting a critical stance toward Holocaust poetry raises what some would say is the real question: whether there can or should be Holocaust poetry at all. Both inside and outside theoretical circles, it is common to refer to the Holocaust as "unspeakable," an adjective that augurs ill for any poetic subject matter. The term "unspeakable" conflates two very different claims about representation of the Holocaust. On the one hand, Elie Wiesel and others have insisted that the Holocaust is literally beyond verbal representation—a claim that may seem absurd coming from someone famed for his Holocaust writing, but which is, strictly speaking, true. Whether "the Holocaust" is taken to refer to individuals' agonies or aggregate atrocity, its meaning surely exceeds the referential capacities of language. If Primo Levi is right, only the murdered knew the real story of their suffering; post-Holocaust language can only gesture vaguely toward an abyss none of the writers has ever plumbed (84). With regard to the full scope of decade- and continent-spanning destruction, there were no witnesses; no mind, not even Hitler's, comprehended all the horrifying details. As a result, Holocaust, Shoah (its Hebrew name), Khurbn (in Yiddish) are empty signs of an evil that beggars cognition. On the other hand, there are those, like Claude Lanzmann, Berel Lang, and the speaker in "Autobiography," who argue that the Holocaust is unspeakable because language is all too adequate for representing it—so adequate that the act of representation is self-defeating. At first the details horrify, but once domesticated by language's generalizing, categorizing, causality-implying conventions, they can't help but become a bore. In this view, when verbal representations of the Holocaust move us, they move us in the wrong direction, easing our transition from stunned survivors to sated, over-sophisticated connoisseurs of catastrophe. "The well-known events took place," "Autobiography"'s speaker tells us, sardonically flaunting the anesthetizing effects of language. "There were those who murdered in their own way, / grieved in their own way."

For poets, the abstruse question of the speakability of the Holocaust has a host of moral and poetic consequences. Should poets write about the Holocaust, swathe it in the bandages of aesthetic convention, abstract and ironize its agonies, render its savageries into the soft soap of motif and trope, furnish it with heroes and villains and victims and show-stopping soliloquies? Can poems represent the Holocaust at all, or do they simply propagate morally and culturally vitiating clichés? Do we, in fact, have words for the Holocaust, or does the Holocaust mark the grim border of language, a boundary of anguish and degradation beyond which, before which, silence is the only possible signifier?

Poets seem inspired rather than silenced by the challenges posed by Holocaust representation. Among American and British practitioners alone, the Holocaust poetry canon boasts prominent mid-twentieth century figures such as W. H. Auden, John Berryman, Denise Levertov, Stephen Spender, Anne Sexton, Charles Reznikoff, Jerome Rothenberg, Randall Jarrell, and Sylvia Plath, and several generations of recent and contemporary poets, including Adrienne Rich, Anthony Hecht, William Heyen, Geoffrey Hill, Irena Klepfisz, Jacqueline Osherow, Irving Feldman, Jorie Graham, James Fenton, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, Carolyn Forché, Jason Sommer, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Lyn Lifshin, Gerald Stern, and C. K. Williams. This list is far from exhaustive; a devoted bibliographer could turn up thousands of published poems in English—and tens or even hundreds of thousands unpublished—on or related to the Holocaust.

All this production suggests that poets find the problems posed by writing poetry after Auschwitz stimulating rather than daunting. For one thing, the Holocaust—and thus, by extension, poetry written about it—matters. The very unspeakability of the Holocaust, the taboos surrounding its representation, make Holocaust poetry a high-stakes act that commands, by poetic standards, an unusual degree of attention. In Wordsworth's day, poetic portrayals of peasants (even iambicized peasants) could create a stir; Whitman whipped up scandal by abandoning metrical form and celebrating sexuality; Allen Ginsberg's career was launched by a well-publicized obscenity trial over Howl's paeans to fellatio, drugs, and be-bop. But for decades, American and British poets have smeared body parts and phonemes across the page without raising an eyebrow. The Holocaust, a subject whose import is acknowledged even by those who deny it occurred, amplifies the poetry written about it, elevating it to the level of public discourse.

Moreover, Holocaust poetry partakes of what theorists call, with due irony, the "negative sublimity" of the Holocaust. In an era in which spectacles of violence and victimization constitute popular entertainment, the Holocaust trumps every trauma. Indeed, one of the major difficulties in writing Holocaust poetry is the ease with which Holocaust poems evoke its sublimely stomach-turning savageries. It is possible—all too possible—to write a "powerful" poem by mechanically stringing together the "relatively meager cluster of images" which, as Gubar notes, have come to represent the Holocaust: "trains and tracks, showers and soap, brandings and burnings, thrown-away children and the living dead, discarded shoes and extracted teeth, barbed wire and ovens, heaps of hair and ashes and bodies, broken glass and Zyklon gas, smoke and stars" (258). The impact of such images has little to do with poetry, and everything to do with the glamour of what one bitter quip calls "Shoah business." Holocaust poetry may, as Gubar claims, reflect a Shelley-esque drive "to make the imagination a moral good," but this drive is invariably fueled by the flames of the crematoria (14). Even "Autobiography"'s refusal to specify horrifying details evokes them, and this evocation transforms flat understatement into a heroic gesture, backlit and magnified by all that the speaker omits. The ineluctable taint of Shoah business makes revulsion at "the very concept of exploiting the Shoah as a subject or pretext for art," as Gubar puts it, an integral aspect—indeed, a threshold condition—of Holocaust poetry (xvii). Theodor Adorno's widely-quoted 1949 pronouncement that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" notwithstanding, it isn't poetry that Auschwitz rendered barbaric; it is the notion of the poetic as a self-sufficient, self-satisfied, and self-satisfying category of activity (quoted in Gubar 4). In Holocaust poetry, shame at turning atrocity into a pretext for art must be palpable as a revulsion against the very texture of the poetic—which is why, as Gubar notes, Holocaust poems are "[r]arely 'good' poems in [the traditional] sense of the word" (14). Dan Pagis, for example, writing in rhyme-rich Hebrew, eradicated all rhyme from "Autobiography" beyond brute repetition of identical words. Paul Celan imploded the lyrical gift displayed in "Death-Fugue" and other early work into increasingly gnomic word-spasms. Jason Sommer, writing in a contemporary American tradition in which amusicality has long been taken for granted, violates even free verse's relaxed rhetorical standards, eschewing the prosy ease of conversational idiom for painfully awkward precision:

Sommer's acknowledgement of the shameful Shoah-business aspect of Holocaust poetry is reflected in his slack, antipoetic specificity—the devotion of the first three lines of the poem to scene-setting data, the superfluous "some" that fudges the rhythm and impact of "some years before breasts and Meyer were ash." By violating the poetic imperatives of compression and rhetorical verve in the service of historical specificity, Sommer's diction highlights a central feature of Holocaust poetics: the conflict between aesthetics and history, between the rarified world of poetry and the village-idiot-baiting, mass-murdering, photograph-perusing world beyond it. In taking the Holocaust as their reference point and occasion, Holocaust poems ineluctably yoke themselves to a history that mocks aesthetic values. Holocaust poems can't afford to evade this conflict; they live on and through it. That is why, as Gubar points out, "revulsion against and repeated return to the aesthetic are precisely what characterize the production of Holocaust poetry" (xvii). While Sommer's anti-poetic opening rips the nostalgic sepia gauze that smothers this sliver of "gone world," he soon palpably "return[s] to the aesthetic." The lines begin to break along rhythmic contours, vowels and consonants cluster, and a falling rhythm stirs beneath the prosaic metrical shroud, signaling the restoration of Vishniac's "still" to verb-charged, frame-dissolving life:

The opening lines of "Meyer Tsits" abjure the meaning-multiplying power of enjambment—the definitive textual sign of the poetic—in favor of flat-footed precision. But here, the breaks in the lines that bring Meyer and his world to a "rain-glossed" semblance of life generate a cascade of razor-sharp double-entendres. The kitsch nostalgia of "Hasidim argu[ing] passionately" is sardonically indicted by "over matters of indifference." This editorial sneer is startlingly turned back on the editorializers—"those outside their picture"—in the following line, a frame-rupturing phrase that turns the scene into a mirror reflecting the "indifference" of those who gaze at it—the speaker, his father, Vishniac's many devotees, readers of Sommer's poem. That off-putting effect is inverted by the following line, which places us not only inside the gone world of the photograph but inside the gone worldview of the passionate Hassidim—a worldview which comprehends such "matters of indifference" as "the world to come, the Messiah, / and the immortality of the soul." These enjambments undermine the sepia-tinted distance between the readerly present and the murdering, murdered past. But even this return to the aesthetic acknowledges the supremacy of history. The use of enjambment to blur the boundaries between past and present, image and observer, judger and judged, living and dead, makes it impossible to forget that this is only a textual resurrection, an illusion sparked by an arrangement of marks on a page. Even as Meyer begins to "shuffle the spanceled / steps of a Chinese woman," the line breaks remind us that this gone world's return to life is a purely rhetorical construction, that this past is truly past.

One can only register Holocaust poetry's "revulsion against and repeated return to the aesthetic"—and the conflict between aesthetic form and historical content that it signifies—through readings close enough to mark the interplay of poetic and anti-poetic elements in the poems. While close reading is still a staple skill for poets, it fell from critical favor with the decline of New Criticism and its post-structuralist Döppelganger, deconstruction, and the ascendance of New Historicism and its post-post-structuralist Döppelganger, cultural studies. Gubar's book, which minimizes but cannot completely avoid close reading, stands in awkward, essentially apologetic relation to this critical fashion, even as it urges critics to recognize the importance of Holocaust poetry. "I ask my reader's pardon," her Preface begins, introducing an astonishing string of mea culpas for her choice of subject matter ("many of the works I discuss in this book are likely to offend"); her failure to provide "capacious theoretical models for understanding trauma in general"; and her concern with poetic form ("I often took refuge in the shelter poets found, in formal techniques that seemed to require weird names") (xv, xvii). In short, Gubar's Preface anticipates a scholarly readership whose attitude toward poetry in general—and Holocaust poetry in particular—ranges from disinterest to hostility. Gubar's most acute analyses show that she is an able and impassioned close reader. But the need to defend and explicate poetry to an antipathetic critical audience has led Gubar to devote most of Poetry after Auschwitz to survey-style summary, paraphrase, and exegesis. As a result, only a few of Gubar's readings, such as her excellent analysis of Osherow's "Villanelle from a Sentence in a Poet's Brief Biography," are close enough to register the conflict between aesthetic form and historical content that is at the heart of Holocaust poetry. In fact, by separating the content of poems from their realization in language, Gubar's paraphrastic readings erase any signs of tension between the historical and the aesthetic. And since, as the New Critics pointed out in what now feels like the prehistory of criticism, poetic content cannot be abstracted from poetic form without some degree of simplification and alteration, when paraphrase replaces close reading as the basis for poetic analysis, the resulting critical claims often bear a tenuous relation to the actual text. Take Gubar's discussion of one of the most controversial poetic uses of the Holocaust, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy":

Part of the controversy over "Daddy" is demographic. As an American non-Jew with no autobiographical connection to the Holocaust (though Plath's father was German, he was no Nazi), Plath's right to vent her poetic spleen through similes such as "Chuffing me off like a Jew . . . to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen" has come under fire. But the charge that "Daddy"'s critics have leveled most vociferously is that Plath uses the Holocaust in general, and the genocidal operations against Jews in particular, as a metaphoric megaphone to amplify her psychological problems with her father. It is one thing for a non-Jewish poet to represent the Holocaust, but it is quite another for her to reduce the systematic murder of millions to grist for the confessional mill. Hilda Schiff explains that she includes "Daddy" in her Holocaust Poetry anthology precisely for that reason—because it "show[s] how Holocaust terms have been absorbed in everyday language"(xxiv). Whatever one thinks of Schiff's editorial decision, her rationale straightforwardly acknowledges the conflict between Holocaust content and rhetorical form in Plath's poem. But rather than reading "Daddy" as a personal vendetta that exploits the Holocaust, Gubar argues that "Daddy" is a Holocaust poem that exploits the rhetoric of personal vendetta:

"Daddy" not only "highlight[s] the precariousness of [Plath's] identification with the Jews of Nazi Germany"—it dares us to take umbrage at its transmogrification of "Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen" into a personal trope and, lest we shy from the bait, raises the stakes by suggesting, à la Nazi racial theory, that buried Jewish identity can be betrayed by speech patterns ("I began to talk like a Jew"). But as Schiff acknowledges, "Daddy" isn't about the Holocaust at all, and thus, whether or not German Jews exhibited "vicarious identification with their exterminators," the notion that "Daddy"'s histrionic Holocaust references amount to a profound exploration of the Jews' agonized relation to the culture that decided, in the space of a few years, to annihilate them, is ludicrous and offensive. Indeed, while "Daddy"'s speaker spews hair-raising insights into the father-daughter relationship and sexual politics in general, the poem seems to know little about Jews beyond a few of the more famous locales of their extermination. The poem's dismissive equation of Jews and Gypsies ("With my gypsy ancestress . . . / And my Taroc pack . . . / I may be a bit of a Jew") flaunts the speaker's ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of Jewish identity—and sets some kind of Holocaust poetry record by sneering at two categories of victim at once. In short, the precarious identification of "Daddy"'s speaker with Jews no more "asks us to consider the dynamics of German Jews' vicarious identification with their exterminators" than the precarious identification of the speaker of Donne's "The Flea" with a parasitic insect asks us to consider the dynamics of fleas' relations to those who crush them. This is not to say that "Daddy" shouldn't be counted as Holocaust poetry—but if included in the Holocaust canon, it should be included not because it is about the Holocaust but because in it, as Schiff says, "Holocaust imagery abounds," and thus the poem participates in the Holocaust's cultural afterlife.

As Gubar argues, Holocaust poetry, along with the work of other "artists and scholars who address the Holocaust," is necessary to "keep . . . the Holocaust alive[,] . . . to make the present see the past as one of its crucial, ongoing concerns so as to ensure that it will not disappear irretrievably" (6, 7). If writing Holocaust poetry is indeed a vital means of staying engaged with Western civilization's definitive atrocity, it is imperative to ask what work Holocaust poems aspire to, and when they do and do not achieve it. Though "Holocaust poetry" is a content-based category, as the controversy over "Daddy" demonstrates, content alone cannot enable us to answer this question. Clearly, the way in which Plath's poem "keeps the Holocaust alive"—if it does—is radically different from the cultural life support provided by "Meyer Tsits" or "Autobiography."

But before we delve into such complex distinctions, we need to address a much broader question: how, amid the vast and burgeoning mass of Holocaust poetry, can we distinguish texts that exhibit what Gubar calls "aesthetic ambition or historical seriousness"—texts, that is, which invite and repay critical attention to the work they do—from those which should be read simply as "heartfelt and personal reactions to the disaster" (xvii)? Gubar's tactful terms allude to qualitative judgments that contemporary literary critics—and most commentators on Holocaust poetry—tend to avoid. Schiff, with a poet's pragmatism, states the problem more directly. In the interests of including "as many divergent perspectives within the Holocaust maelstrom as space would permit," she acknowledges that her anthology contains some poems that "are not of equal literary distinction"—poems that "have earned their place" in the anthology as a result of what they say, rather than how they say it (xv, xxiv). However, neither Gubar, Schiff, nor any other critic I am aware of has offered criteria for distinguishing Holocaust poems of "aesthetic ambition" and "literary distinction" from those which should be read as "heartfelt and personal reactions to the disaster."

Let me propose one criterion. I suggested above that Holocaust poems must acknowledge the barbarity of making poetry out of Auschwitz by registering their revulsion against the aesthetic. This revulsion is, paradoxically, the mark of their aesthetic ambition. In "heartfelt and personal" Holocaust poems, there is no revulsion against the aesthetic; the means of poetry effortlessly serve the ends of personal expression:

In this "heartfelt and personal" poem, the aesthetic is represented by the incessant line breaks that amplify the emotional content of the poem, miming feelings so strong they cannot let sentences complete themselves, surrounding the slender lines with white space that testifies to the inexpressible guilt-stricken grief—or is it grief-stricken guilt?—of the daughter-of-survivors speaker. Thanks to the line breaks' dramatizing effects, every word of the passage points toward the speaker's "personal reaction" to the horrifying Holocaust details. The seamless fit between lyric form and Holocaust content inadvertently suggests that the poem's subject matter fits quite neatly within the bubble of the aesthetic. At first the details horrify, but finally they're material for poetry. And while, as Gubar notes, aesthetically ambitious Holocaust poems recoil from their poetic exploitation of the Holocaust, in heartfelt, personal poems like "Leaving You," such moral qualms are mooted: the claim to validity such poems make is based not on aesthetic grounds, which quake under the chastening gaze of the history they invoke, but on the grounds of emotional authenticity.

In their revulsion against the aesthetic, Holocaust poems like "Meyer Tsits" and "Autobiography" call into question—and prompt us to question—the honesty and value of their representations of the Holocaust, and the honesty and value of our responses to those representations. In embracing the aesthetic, poems like "Leaving You" deflect judgment from themselves to their subject: rather than confronting us with the paradoxes of Holocaust representation, they summon us to mourn with the victims and rage at the perpetrators. But as Gubar notes, the "mandate" of aesthetically ambitious Holocaust poetry—its license to thrive on content that should by all rights shame poetry into silence—"resides" in its "resistance to closure with respect to consideration or judgment of the events that transpired during the Shoah" (20). It is not that such poems blame victims or exculpate their tormenters, but that they forestall our automatic responses to the Holocaust, the knee-jerk moral and emotional reflexes that, as the speaker of "Autobiography" notes, ease us from horror to boredom:

The last of Miklós Radnóti's "Postcards," this poem was written on the forced march that culminated in the Hungarian poet's murder and exhumed after the war from a mass grave. The diction, like the bodies it describes, is taut with impending death, tensed between anticipation and rigor mortis. Yet even here, recording atrocities that will imminently overtake the author (and, incidentally, the death of his friend, Miklós Lorsi), the poem is marked by a cool, ironic distance, a "resistance to closure with respect to consideration or judgment of the events" at the most fundamental level. The poem eschews poetic and narrative devices that might trigger clichéd responses to atrocity in favor of an almost clinical detachment. The death of the poet's friend is reported not as human tragedy but as brute physical perception, raw fact; there is nothing here to evoke sympathy or sorrow; even the blood is "filthy" and already drying to a crust on the speaker's ear. Moreover, as close as the poem brings us to the experience of mass extermination, it too highlights the conflict between history and aesthetics: its every conjugation reminds us that we cannot tell if the speaker is living or dead, addressing us in the midst of slaughter or recounting the past, about to be killed or miraculously delivered. Its news remains news, its horrifying details horrifying, precisely because it so stubbornly rejects the safety nets of narrative and moral closure.

Though "Postcards" is exceptional—few poems survived such proximity to the catastrophe, and few poets have ever had the nerve or the skill to skate so close to the edge of death—in its resistance to closure and cliché and its insistence on its own problematic textuality it epitomizes the cultural work to which aesthetically ambitious Holocaust poetry must aspire. As the Holocaust recedes in time, this work has become ever more urgent—not only because the events are now several generations removed from the present, and the last eyewitnesses are dying, but because the historical and imaginative writings that have kept the Holocaust alive as a defining historical event have had an unintended side effect. The more the Holocaust is represented in language, the more conventionalized and clichéd—"stylized," as Primo Levi put it—the language of Holocaust representation becomes. Indeed, according to Levi, even survivors' personal testimony has been influenced and stylized by the rhetoric surrounding the Holocaust (20). As historical studies of the Holocaust multiply, the process of stylization makes it ever more difficult to "to keep cultural memory of the Holocaust alive," as Gubar puts it—i.e., to make the culturally circulated images of the Holocaust meaningful for individuals not personally affected by the disaster (xv). The vitality of the connection between past and present, subjectivity and history, is always tenuous. Stylized language automates this connection, implying that the meaning of the past is a given, that both the historical facts of the Holocaust and our subjective responses to it are embodied in pre-existing images and phrases rather than needing to be re-created through will and imagination. Much Holocaust poetry, like "Leaving You," is written as though the pressure of stylization didn't exist, as though the images of smoke and slaughter hadn't been recycled through thousands of texts. No matter how directly the authors of these poems experienced the catastrophe, no matter how heartfelt and personal the feeling they express, these poems evoke not the Holocaust but the stylized ideas and emotions that threaten to eclipse it.

The work of Holocaust poetry, both aesthetic and cultural, is to resist the process of stylization by playing history and subjectivity against each other. For example, in Radnóti's grim play on the syntax of life and death, the poem cuts rapidly from past-tense reportage that implies a post-atrocity recounting of long-settled events ("'Just lie quietly,' I said to myself") to an ominous present tense that sucks speaker and reader back into the corpse-filled pit ("Patience flowers into death now") and back again ("Dark filthy blood was drying on my ear"), stranding us in the midst of massacre, in a moment which can never end because the distinction between past and present has collapsed. In Radnóti's poem, history's horrifying details literally threaten to bury the subjective voice of the speaker whose perspective we share, creating an enormous pressure on us to push back against history and affirm the vitality of that unextinguishable, long extinguished, subjectivity. At the opposite end of the Holocaust representation spectrum, Paul Celan's idiosyncratic inscapes resist stylization by all but occluding history behind a screen of oblique phenomenological images. Celan's inward-directed Holocaust lyrics prompt us to grope toward the horrifying historical details that lurk behind their psychic and semantic shudders:

There is no Shoah in sight in the nearly pastoral landscape of the first two stanzas, which hover between description and psychological metaphor. Of course, if we know Celan's history, these images point toward all that is not being said about the author's well-known Holocaust past. The sand-buried smoke, for example, reads as a metaphorized metonym for the crematoria, a figure for the recession of atrocity beneath the bland "sand patterns" of time. But these images can readily be read without reference to the author's Holocaust résumé; for all their "excavated feeling," these stanzas present a lyric world familiar since Petrarch's sonnets, an imagistic womb in which nature and psyche suffuse and interpret one another without resistance. However, the mutilated rage of the last three lines punctures this lyric bubble. We cannot continue our fine-tuned exploration of the implicit psyche of the implicit speaker until we account for the narrative implications of the cut-off ear and cut-up eye. These images bear witness to the violence we cannot find within the "scattered beach-grasses" of the poem, for which we must turn to the realm of history. And the moment we turn to history, Celan's history, to put these images into context, the psychic landscape of the first two stanzas is transfigured: the pure subjectivity of "sheer / excavated / feeling" becomes a symptom of the dismembering presence of the past.

The mutually constituting, mutually undermining relationship between subjectivity and history is nowhere more evident than in Holocaust poetry's most characteristic form: soliloquies in the voices of the dead. As Gubar notes, "writ[ing] directly from the perspective of corpses" is "the most noted phenomenon in English verse about the Holocaust, perhaps because the most notorious and decried" (179). The dead constitute the ultimate authority in Holocaust testimony—according to Primo Levi, they are the only witnesses "whose deposition would have general significance"—and poems written in the voice of the dead lay claim to that authority (84). Unlike the living, the dead do not make representations about the Holocaust; they embody it, they constitute its essential testament, its fundamental truth. As a result, when the dead speak in Holocaust poetry, the gap between history and subjectivity seems to collapse. However, post-mortem Holocaust poetry's equation of subjectivity with history exacerbates rather than resolves the tension between them. The dead in Holocaust poetry rarely speak of anything before or beyond their torments. Their lives are reduced to their deaths, and those deaths metonymically stand for millions of other deaths—the very process of simplification that stylization fosters. Aesthetically ambitious post-mortem Holocaust poems combat this tendency by disrupting the equation of subjectivity and history their rhetorical strategy implies:

What gives Irena Klepfisz's speaker her startling semblance of individuality is not the corpse's-eye-view of being gassed and cremated—those horrifying details slip perilously close to cliché—but her unsparing description of the normally sacrosanct body of a "rebetsin" (rabbi's wife) in terms of "sagging breasts," "sparse / pubic hairs," and "weight" sufficient to cause a group of Sonderkommando to "grunt" as they hoist her body. The brutal honesty and disturbing sensuality of these descriptions ensure that the speaker will not be read as a generic Holocaust victim. The poem wants us to both stare at the speaker—to be shocked by her unedited prurience into seeing her as an individual rather than a representative Holocaust victim—and to stare through her eyes, to be implicated as she is in the shame-laced spectacle of the rebetsin's pre- and post-mortem humiliation. Being gassed and cremated cannot erase the stain of her awareness of the rebetsin's degradation, or the guilt-soaked ecstasy of the moment the speaker's "distinct smoke" leaves the rebetsin's corpse "beneath"—and thus the pathos of gas chambers and crematoria cannot erase our vicarious voyeurism in sharing the speaker's observations.

"Death camp"'s condensation of subjectivity and history into this obscenely specific act of witness is a deliberate assault on the stylized images and responses that stand between us and the individuals whose unspeakable sufferings constitute the "true" history of the Holocaust. By speaking in the voice of the dead, "death camp" and other poet-mortem Holocaust poems shift the problem of Holocaust representation from the living—how to "make the [Holocaust] consequential . . . for those born after it"—to the dead: how to resurrect subjectivity from the stylized grave of history, how to restore the individuality effaced by the brute cartoon of death. "Death camp" obviously succeeds in restoring some of the raw physicality and shame obscured by automated phrases such as "Holocaust victims." But as its title suggests, "death camp" still presents its victims as representative, albeit unseemly, ghosts, metonymic stand-ins for millions of murdered victims.

Post-mortem poems like "death camp" attempt to overcome the sheer magnitude of the atrocity by means of particularity, gambling that their speakers' voices will speak to our imaginations in ways that both demand and enable us to answer. Schiff claims that particularization is essential in Holocaust literature: "We can certainly comprehend and feel aghast at the ghoulish facts presented by the historian. But as individuals ourselves we can reach out imaginatively only towards the experience of other individuals" (xiv). But some Holocaust poems take the opposite approach. They erase the particularity "death camp" insists on, so that the Holocaust cannot be located in and thus relegated to a specific person, place, or time. For example, Celan's "Gray-white of sheer" presents no details that identify its speaker and even evades specifying whether its landscape is internal or external. In fact, the poem erases the demarcations of time, space, and identity, making it impossible to localize the poem's "excavated" angst. As the "eye, cut into strips, / does justice to it all," its eternally shaming gaze seems to reproach each of us for an ongoing, omnipresent crime. At the same, however, such generalization risks turning the Holocaust into a sort of metaphysical migraine, an atemporal trauma that obscures the events that occasioned it, the individuals who suffered it, and the perpetrators who caused it.

In negotiating the Scylla and Charybdis of particularization and generalization, subjectivity and history, Holocaust poetry is doomed always to veer too much toward one or the other. As "death camp" suggests, the Holocaust stains all who contemplate it. There is no way to witness, remember, mourn, and above all represent the Holocaust without witnessing, remembering, mourning, or representing too much or too little, too many or too few, too specifically or too abstractly, too subjectively or too objectively, too voyeuristically or from too safe a distance. To attempt to avoid these sins is to attempt to avoid the Holocaust—and as we have seen, what Holocaust poetry demands from its creators and its readers is not avoidance but embrace of the Holocaust's paradoxical imperatives:

In this and other post-mortem Holocaust poems, Pagis, a concentration camp survivor born a few years after Celan in the same vanished province of Bukovina, creates a speaker who is simultaneously general and particular, a distinct individual and a purely representative victim. From its title, "Autobiography" emphasizes the individuality of its speaker; indeed, few corpses can claim such a distinguished lineage: "If my family is famous, / not a little of the credit goes to me. / My brother invented murder, / my parents invented grief, / I invented silence." But the force of generalization is at work even in the speaker's boast of particularity. Within a few lines, the speaker has shifted from the blow-like immediacy of the opening words to presenting his murder as a timeworn anecdote; a few lines later, his death has become a historical footnote, an item in a list of "well-known events," a ripple in history's blood-dimmed tide. And in a subtle but startling pronominal shift, the murdered speaker universalizes himself by claiming kinship with all the murderers and mourners who have succeeded him: "Our inventions were perfected . . . / There were those who murdered in their own way, / grieved in their own way." In fact, the speaker's particularity is inseparable from his universality. As the final stanza makes clear, the speaker is Abel, Western civilization's archetypal murder victim. His remarkably dysfunctional family—Adam, Eve and all their murder-, grief- and silence-perfecting descendants—is ours. Abel is not only talking to us—he is talking as us; his story is our own. By fusing the Holocaust with Abel's murder, "Autobiography" marries the bitterly argued poles of Holocaust representation, insisting that the Holocaust simultaneously transcends history and is inseparable from it, writing every human being, every atrocity, into Abel's family tree. The sardonic "Afterwards" that marks the end of Abel's immediate family history makes it impossible for us to differentiate between his past and our present, or even—thanks to Pagis's canny use of the passive voice—to identify our own places among the murderers and the victims, the "us's" and the "thems." The result is a Holocaust whose violence is as particular as "the first blow" that felled Abel, but unbounded by space and time, whose "underground cells reach everywhere."

 
What makes a Holocaust poem work? The first ingredient is aesthetic ambition—the perhaps obscene determination to make art of atrocity rather than simply express "heartfelt and personal reactions to the disaster." The absence of aesthetic ambition doesn't make a Holocaust poem "bad"—rather, it means that the poetics of the text should be looked through rather than looked at, that what matters is its emotional or historical content. By contrast, the content of aesthetically ambitious Holocaust poetry is inseparable from its poetics—and from its anti-poetics. As Gubar puts it, these poems "paradoxically put on display the tension between historical reference and imaginative figuration (27)." In aesthetically ambitious Holocaust poetry, the weight of history strains and shames the aesthetic act of "imaginative figuration." Whatever their means, aesthetically ambitious Holocaust poems must struggle with the insufficiency of "imaginative figuration" in the presence of the Shoah—or they do not seem to be confronting the Holocaust at all. But even as Holocaust poems highlight the inadequacy of their "imaginative figurations," they must resist the closure, the clarity, and above all the temporal and moral distance that historical perspective seems to afford. In many respects, the work of Holocaust poetry is to interfere with the resolution of atrocity into history, to prevent the Holocaust from collapsing into chronologies and catalogues, to keep the past painfully present and unaccounted for by the stylized boredom of well-oiled sentiments, endlessly iterated horrifying details, and moral clichés.

But though all Holocaust poems are subject to these imperatives, Gubar's claim that "[a]uthors of Holocaust poetry create a unique tradition" is wrong. Subject matter alone does not constitute a poetic tradition. Common preoccupation can only become tradition when poets self-consciously participate in what they recognize as a shared poetic endeavor. When American or British poets sit down to write a sonnet, for example, they consciously (if sometimes dimly) locate themselves in relation to a recognized poetic lineage. Every sonnet is written with or against certain conventions, adopts or avoids certain tropes, invokes or distances itself from major predecessors—and becomes a steppingstone for the sonnets of the future. But no matter how many Holocaust poems we read, we find none of the nods, obeisances, or nose-thumbing to predecessors and contemporaries that mark—and constitute—a tradition. When Holocaust poems register their resistance to stylized modes of representation, this resistance is directed against cultural clichés rather than poetic conventions. Indeed, while some Holocaust poems allude to others, most exhibit little awareness that innumerable other poems trade on the same "relatively meager cluster of images."

Not only isn't there a tradition of Holocaust poetry, the need to resist stylization means that there can't be—or at least shouldn't be—such a tradition. Stylization is inherent in the very concept of tradition; traditions constitute and perpetuate themselves through the self-conscious adoption of stylized tropes, devices, and rhetoric. Holocaust poems cannot accede to stylization without sacrificing their aesthetic ambitions and their justification for "exploiting the Shoah as a subject or pretext for art." To create a tradition of Holocaust poetry would be to turn writing Holocaust poems into a self-conscious manipulation of stylized forms—the very sort of ethical and aesthetic nightmare that haunts anti-representational Holocaust polemics. That is why, though they worry the same small set of tropes and "horrifying details," aesthetically ambitious Holocaust poems bear the weight of history in isolation. Each marks a separate "raid on the inarticulate," to use Eliot's 1942 term, a separate confrontation with the limits of poetry, language, humanness:

This paradoxical voice is the quintessential voice of Holocaust poetry. Sardonic and naïve, isolated on the shores of death and standing for all that is human, rhetoric flattened by the unspeakable weight of history yet charged with the world-creating force of "let there be light," Holocaust poetry despairs through affirmation ("man is a great treasure / I repeated stubbornly") and affirms—defiant, in subjunctive wistfulness—through despair:

works cited

Paul Celan, Glottal Stop: 101 Poems, Nikolai Popov, Heather McHugh, trans. (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000).

Susan Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003).

Irena Klepfisz, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971-1990) (Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1990).

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989).

Dan Pagis, Variable Directions, Stephen Mitchell, trans. (Berkeley, CA: North Point Press, 1989).

Hilda Schiff, ed., Holocaust Poetry (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995).

Jason Sommer, Other People's Troubles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).