ABSTRACT

Its music, its beauty, the cadence of its striking repetition, make problematic our relationship to it. As we read we are enveloped not so much by

its sadness as by the pleasure it gives to us. The poem acts as a catharsis for our sorrow, evidence, as Lawrence Langer suggests, that "what dims the light of creation need not extinguish the lamps of language" (H&L 15). It is, then, transformed from a poem of destruction to a poem of promise and revitalization. Pleasure and hope sing from the ashes and we recognize why Theodore Adorno and George Steiner warned so vehemently against, as Steiner put it, "an art of atrocity," explaining that "The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason" ( 123).