Paul Klee, Poet/Painter (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

the long version

"A posthumously published collection of Klee's Gedichte contains poems he recorded in a notebook, others he inscribed in visual settings, and line endings he salvaged from discarded poems. Paul Klee, Poet/Painter pairs selections from Klee's poetry with English translations that capture their spirit as well as their literal meanings. This first scholarly monograph devoted to Klee's poetic production considers poems he identified as such and visual images that are poetic in their compositional techniques, metaphorical imagery, and linear structures. Klee's poems and related visual images are placed within a spectrum of contemporary poetic practice. Contextual analogies reveal that Klee matched wits with Christian Morgenstern, rose to the provocations of Kurt Schwitters, and gave new form to the Surrealists' "exquisite corpses." By the end of his life Klee discovered his own poetic voice in alphabet drawings that read as anagrams and pictorial poems that challenge conventional distinctions between verbal and visual forms of expression." "Paul Klee, Poet/Painter is a case study in the reciprocity of poetry and painting in early modernist practice. It introduces readers to a little-known facet of Klee's creative activity and re-evaluates his contributions to a modernist aesthetic."--BOOK JACKET.