"Well after his death in 1955”, says John Willett, "Brecht the poet remained like an unsuspected time-bomb ticking away beneath the engine-room of world literature." It is indeed unfortunate that the popularity of Brecht the dramatist has till now overshadowed Brecht the poet. Even staunch Brechtians have failed to see that his poems led into and permeated his plays from which the theories in turn sprang. And this is partly due to the fact that poetry in general is not as easy to translate as a play is.As a matter of fact, in 1928 when Brecht was 30, Kurt Tucholosky called him a "master of language with something to him", and regarded him as one of the countrys "most gifted living poets." For Clement Greenberg, he is "all poet" and Lion Feuchtwanger reckoned him as the one German "Sprachschopfer".
As a poet, Brecht is with Yeats. Like Yeats, he seems to believe in a world which is always changing: things are in a flux. So, too, life is. A Brecht-poem emerges mainly out of a tension as was the case with many of Yeatss poems. The tension is due to an irreconcilable contradiction between the dying old world and the emerging new one. And Brecht seems to plunge headlong into it, catches up the moment-in-transand, then, re-performs it in poetry through--what he himself advocates-- a gestic language’. With an open eye and being aware of the world-historic process, Brecht felt his surroundings on his nerves, in his bones. His initial perceptions turned into thoughts and thoughts, in turn, into beliefs. It is here that his poetry gains a geisteswissenschaften quality. Poems like Legend of the Dead Soldier, Die Tepichweber von Kujan-Bulak ehren Lenin, The Vanished Fame of the Great City of New York, Praise of the Dialectic and Childrens Rymn’ prognostically define the contemporary habitat and he wishes to see the 20th century man escaping not towards the past but towards futures which have no existence until we discover and settle them. In the poem,‘Praise of the Dialectic, Force says: "As things are, so shall they remain". And amongst the oppressed many say: "What we want will never be". But the Dialectic concludes: "Those who still live must not say never.... If lost, fight! The vanquished of today are the victors of tomorrow." Brecht is one of those few poets who use the materialist dialectic as a weapon of poetry.
Brecht, right from the very beginning, seemed to have developed a scorn for the bourgeois Kultur as he observed the hypocritical nature of pre-war Augsburg societys devotion to it and throughout his career as a writer he endeavoured hard to fight back this bourgeois capitalist in his writings. Here, the influence of Whitman also played significant role. Resultantly, in his plays as well as in his poems the main thesis remains that it is necessary to renounce individual in order is to create a better world. It is here, again, that he comes quite close to Indian culture which propounds the grand notion of an altruistic WE instead of an individualistic I. As a poet, Brecht has vision offuture world similar to the idea of vasudhaivkutumbkam-- the whole world is a family--so well taught and practised by Indian sages and thinkers. In his search for the realization of it, Brecht quite avowedly embraced the communist dogma for which to some extent he had to sacrifice his creative freedom. And, finally, like a Rigvedic rishi, Brecht wears the Bardic Pose’-- his special fondness for the ballad form ought to be considered here-- similar to that of the peasant-poet of an Indian village (and/or a Rigvedic rishi, of course!) who keeps intact the ethico-aesthetic values of the village folk and keeps himself in the state of an anonymous figure throughout his life. It may be recalled in this connection that Brecht was much to hesitant to see his poems published.
There is always a religiousity about most of Brechts poems. He has called them Psalms and Hymns. Unlike a Vedantist who believes that the whole world is maya--illusion, Brecht as a poet-cum-prophet may be likened to the Rgvedicrshis who never did discard this world-- rather proclaimed it to be as miraculous and satyamas the soul, and who never were blind to the demands of eehloka-- the mundane world of here and now. To quote a line from the Yogadarsanam:
DrésyamBhogayavargartham.
(The visible world is for the sake of mundane pleasure and celestial bliss or salvation of the soul).
And Brecht is with Hegel who propounds that "Truth is concrete". A genius of a race as Brecht is, he justifies what Yeats once wrote that "Talent perceives differences, Genius unity". As a poet Brecht transcends himself and unlike Milton who justifies "the ways of God to men", Bertolt Brecht justifies the ways of man to God.
Anuraag Sharma