Readings in the Mist: Two November Poems by W. G. Sebald1

Abstract

W. G. Sebald wrote and published poetry from the early 1960s until his death in 2001. Even though Sebald's oeuvre is among the most assiduously studied in Germanistik today, however, his lyric poetry has yet to receive any serious attention by scholarly critics. Through close readings of two representative poems from Sebald's last years (“Ruhiges Novemberwetter” and “In Alfermée”), I seek to redress this neglect in the present article. These poems deal with well‐known preoccupations of the author, such as landscape, memory, history, intertextuality, and death. On closer inspection, however, the details of their poetic form—their versification, phonetic patterning, imagery and semantic ambiguity—make it clear that they cannot be read as mere small‐scale versions of his prose. Sebald's poems are complex and evocative works of great literary merit, which simultaneously partake of and question the generic specificity of poetry.