This long-needed and long-awaited collection of Brecht’s poems in English translation is a landmark both of Brecht scholarship and of poetry publishing in Britain.

Though numerically it contains only some 500 of about 1,000 poems in all, such figures are misleading. Connoisseurs may find the odd item missing, but all the essential poems are here, and every kind of poem Brecht wrote is represented. In addition, Brecht’s own very important prose writing on poetry is appended. This, after the excellent editors’ introduction to the volume, is well worth reading first.

The editing is scrupulous but unpedantic throughout, and it is difficult to think of another modern poet who has been so well served. This is poetic justice indeed, in view of the numerous obstacles which prevented the publication of so much of Brecht’s work in any language in his lifetime.

‘Poems’, Brecht himself writes here, ‘are unsociable creatures. On the whole they are disagreeable when herded together and they get on badly with one another.’ Although this is true of any collection of poetry, which is not usually written to be read in a bound volume, it is perhaps less true in this case because of the extraordinary diversity of Brecht’s moods and styles, ranging from the orgiastic and the grotesque to the calm and the simple.

This does not mean that Brecht’s work lacks unity. From ‘Orge’s list of wishes’ (in 1917) to ‘Pleasures’ (1956) in other words from his early asocial, prepolitical poems to the end, when for him human concern permeated the most simple objects to a Wordsworthian degree – his sensuousness, erotic, tactile and visual, pervades his work.

Besides this, and the sardonic, even brutal humour which never left him, are the recurring themes of identification with the beaten and down and out (for instance, as early as in the prophetic ‘Falada’ poem of 1919 or the great ‘Marie Farrar’ poem of 1922), and the obsessional love of enduring people and objects (organic and inorganic), from the grass which is stronger than the bull in ‘Song about a sweetheart’ of 1922, to the old twine in ‘The abandoned greenhouse’ of 1954.

This personal consistency which gives Brecht’s work its essential unity of course does not mean that he did not change, or was not capable of writing in a startling variety of styles, according to the occasion – private or public – which elicited the poem.

As the editors well point out, the all too common picture of Brecht the anarchist rebel undergoing a more or less sudden conversion to communism – a picture already to a certain extent contradicted by his development as a playwright – is further belied by study of the poems, which show both bow his commitment to the oppressed, and specifically to the working class, antedated his adoption of the communist cause (for instance in ‘Coal for Mike’, 1926), and how the personal images of physical disgust, characteristic of much of the early work, recur later, for example in the ‘Hollywood elegies’.

One of the most striking aspects of Brecht’s poetry is the particular relation in it of content and form – the fact that his most discordant utterances are often expressed in the most disciplined verse, and that when expressing a sense of harmony he worked to avoid any implicit passivity by writing in unrhymed verse, near to prose, identifying its outer circumstances rather than evoking its inner feeling.

Everyone will have their particular favourites in this magnificent collection, and much will be fresh and surprising to Brecht’s new English-reading public: the remarkable Christmas poems, the love poetry (both erotic and tender), and the poems about apparently intimate trivialities like ‘On a portable radio’, ‘Washing’ and ‘On sprinkling the garden’, as well as the more public poems like ‘The Moscow workers take possession of the great Metro’ and the bitter and strident ‘Anachronistic procession’ (closely based on Shelley’s ‘Masque of anarchy’). And who could resist the affectionate sonnet, ‘Cow feeding’, with the lines:

Her body’s stout, her ancient eye is bleary
Inured to weakness, she chews with caution.
The years have made her see things in proportion
She’s not surprised now at your interfering.
And while she gets the hay down someone
Is milking her. Patient, without a sound
She lets his hand go tweaking at her teats.
She knows that hand, and doesn’t turn around
She’d sooner not know what is going on
But takes advantage of the evening mood, and shits.

Adrian Mitchell once wrote that ‘most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’. Almost all of Brecht’s poetry precisely does not ignore most people. Let us hope that it will therefore both bring them closer to poetry and, through its influence, bring our poets closer to them.

Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956 (edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim), London: Methuen, 1976

[ Tribune, 14 May 1976 ]