Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on May 26, 2007
Literary Imagination 2007 9(3):275-289; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm068
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Poeta Pictor : On the Iconic Verse of Günter Kunert
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The quantity and quality as well as the innovative peculiarity of contemporary iconic poetizing in German letters are truly amazing; no other literature, it seems, can even remotely compete with it in that respect. On the one hand, there is the poetess Margot Scharpenberg who, in the main, has indulged herself in traditional iconic poetry, granted, yet the sheer number of whose iconic poems—ten volumes so far, with hundreds of pertinent texts—cannot but strike the reader or critic as most extraordinary. On the other hand, there is the poet and, at the same time, graphic artist Günter Kunert who has composed merely two dozen or so iconic poems, to be sure, yet whose creations—heterogeneous, or hybrid, for the most part—reveal themselves not just as extraordinary but as singular and unique.1 In between, as it were, the lyricist Walter Helmut Fritz occupies a position equidistant from either of those extremes, for