ABSTRACT
A poetics of loss elaborates on the poetic expression, representation, and remembrance of loss as intricate personal matter that despite its ultimate ineffability unites us all. The essay focuses on Austrian intellectual and internationally acclaimed poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973), who in the 1960s suffered a personal breakdown and stopped publishing poetry in favor of experimental prose but, in spite of her public declaration of having given up poetry, privately continued composing poetic drafts that she never authorized for publication—fragmentary, graphic, visceral verse partially, gradually, and posthumously published from Bachmann’s estate. Located at the intersection of literature and medicine, Bachmann’s late verse is of exceptional interdisciplinary interest because her psycho-poetic tēchne transcends time-honored canonized genres of loss (such as the verbal eulogy and elegy, and the visual pietà and compianto) and weighs heavier than the sensationalist press controversy that was ushered in by its appearance. With her challenging intertextually endowed pathographic testimony, Bachmann provided posterity not with illness as metaphor (to borrow from Susan Sontag), nor with aesthetic sublimation, but with an autobiographically infused poetic embodiment of betrayal and despair, crisis and defeat—with loss literalized in verse.
