ABSTRACT
T here have been any num ber of studies of B rech t’s theatre and d ram atic theory, bu t still very few discussions, in English cer tainly, even ten years after the publication of the excellent Poems. 1913-1956 which m ake use of this resource to exam ine his ideas and work as a poet. Brecht the poet tends consequently to trail behind Brecht the playw right and theorist of ‘epic th e a tre ’ like a private shadow behind the m ore public persona. In ano ther way,
however, in a quite d istinct and heavily connotated usage, Brecht has been persistently regarded and even defended as, above all, a ‘p oe t’. T he by now notorious, bu t by no m eans only exam ple of this, is M artin Esslin who deploys the term s ‘po et’ and poetry ’ in a fam iliar lexicon of artistic analysis and appreciation , to rescue the ‘rea l’ Brecht, the unconscious, natura l creative talent, from Brecht the self-willed M arx ist theorist. T hus Esslin writes of how ‘T he poet deep w ithin him always had to hide behind the M arx ist’;1 bu t of how Brecht was able, nevertheless,
to follow his creative im pulse and to produce plays, which based as they are on his intu itive perception of reality ra ther than his consciously held beliefs, constantly belie the pedan tic concepts of M arx ism and give the audience a genuine insight into the dilem m as of the hum an cond ition .2
