The Image and Influence of America in German Poetry Since 1945

This book focuses on the image of the US in German poetry and the reception of American poetry in Germany since 1945. Gregory Divers examines poems by major figures in 20th-century German literature - Benn Brecht Bachmann Jandl and Grass among others - and by other poets who shaped America's postwar image in Germany. Divers traces America's postwar status in Germany from the prisoner-of-war poems of Günter Eich to the pop poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Peter Handke. Continuing he finds that although the 1960s protest poems of Erich Fried and others reflect the tarnishing of America's image due to Vietnam 1970s travel poems by Brinkmann Kunert and Kunze confirm the resiliency of that image. Finally Divers looks at poems by Hartung Delius and Kling to illustrate the new heights reached by America's image within German literary circles during the 1980s and the status of America in Germany after reunification. In charting these developments in postwar German poetry Divers also shows how American influences are crucial to its understanding not only surveying postwar German reception of Whitman Eliot Pound and William Carlos Williams but also examining the influence of such figures as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley Allen Ginsberg and the Beats Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.<BR><BR>GREGORY DIVERS is Assistant Professor of German at Saint Louis University.