Trakl, Georg

(1887–1914)

   Born and raised in Salzburg, Trakl had a troubled childhood and an even more problematic adolescence. His relationship with his mother was particularly strained. Though he was intensely close to a younger sister, her claim that they had an incestuous relationship has not been corroborated. His death from heart failure was triggered by alcohol and drug abuse, habits he picked up as a teenager. A trained pharmacist, he had easy access to these substances.

   Trakl lived to see the publication of only one volume of his verse, Gedichte (1913). Nevertheless, his dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish lyrics have qualified him as one of the master expressionist poets in German literature generally. A relentless autumnal melancholy haunts both his prose and his poetry; awareness of temporality and death itself intrude on even the most innocent settings. Quick juxtaposition of seemingly disassociated images intensifies the all-over sense that his writing has been processed through his subconscious. His visions of death do have a kind of Baroque tactility to them, absent, however, conventional hopes for salvation. His repetition of images from poem to poem—lonely landscapes, metallic sounds, or the feel of metal on the body, shepherds and/or hunters trudging across solitary fields—was a standard Baroque technique as well.