Poems

Few American readers seem to be aware that Hermann Hesse, author of the epic novelsSteppenwolfandSiddhartha, among many others, also wrote poetry, the best of which the poet James Wright has translated and included in this book. This is a special volumeÂ--filled with short, direct poems about love, death, loneliness, the seasonsÂ--that is imbued with some of the imagery and feeling of Hesse's novels but that has a clarity and resonance all its own, a sense of longing for love and for home that is both deceptively simple and deeply moving.

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was a German poet and novelist.He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

“Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Gide, Thomas Mann rightly called Hesse a master…  His fiction achieves the glorious anachronism of art: created in the past, it speaks to us in the present.  It glorifies the strategies of attempting to become a full human being and it celebrates the nobility of failure.â€�--Webster Schott, Life
 
“Hesse is  a writer of suggestion, of nuance, of spiritual intimation.â€�--Christian Science Monitor
 
“One of the defining spirits of our century.�--Ralph Freedman, Princeton University