Concerning the Range of Iconic Poetry

In recent years, German iconic poetry has proved to be both extremely prolific and also innovative (cf. my Pictorial Conversations: On Margot Scharpenberg’s Iconic Poetry [Cincinnati, 2006]; “A novel brand of iconic poetry? On the cycle ‘Maskenzug’ by Walter Helmut Fritz,” Literary Imagination 7 [2005]: 349–368; “ Poeta Pictor : On the iconic verse of Günter Kunert,” Literary Imagination 9 [2007]: 275–289). The present investigation concentrates on the respective output of Günter Kunert (b. 1929) and Holger Teschke (b. 1958), thus comprising the two generations in question. Its main result is the insight that iconic poetry – apart from being devoted to an isolated picture or sculpture – can in fact extend from the mere title of a single work of art to a given artist’s entire oeuvre, and even beyond. The paintings and one mural selected by the two poets, plus the poems discussed here, include works by Michelangelo, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), Edvard Munch (1863–1944), and Edward Hopper (1882–1967). The article concludes with a suggestive side‐glance at a text by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who, like Kunert, was born in 1929.