“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, October 28, 2011

Expressionist Realism 2

I nominate this poem by Gottfried Benn as a mine of expressionist realist examples:

Oh, that we were our primordial ancestors.
Small lumps of plasma in a sultry swamp.
Life and death, conception and parturition—
All emerging from those juices soundlessly.

A piece of seaweed or a dune of sand,
Formed by the wind and bound to the earth.
Even a dragon-fly's head or the wing of a gull
Would be too remote and mean too much suffering.

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