Angel Classics Poems - parallel text

The poet and short story writer Georg Heym, who died by drowning aged twenty-four, was one of the major figures of early German modernism, belonging to the brilliant Expressionist generation that included the painters Emil Nolde, Franz Marc and Wassili Kandinsky and the young poets who were to die in the First World War like Georg Trakl, Alfred Lichtenstein and Ernst Stadler.

Heym's often explosive and shocking images are contained in verse of strict classical form and metre, giving it a thrilling tension and force. One of his most famous poems, 'War', written before 1914, contains the line 'A mighty city sank in yellow smoke' - a premonition of the Second World War and beyond.

Antony Hasler's is the fullest selection of Heym's verse to appear in English.