ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses about twenty poems and a dozen compositions. It provides the purported musicality of 'Todesfuge' with respect to its reception by journalistic criticism, by scholarly research, and by two composers, while arguing for a view of the musico-poetic relations in terms of a large-scale metaphorical dynamic. The book discusses metric structure and rhyme schemes as historically established sites of poetry's metaphorical interplay with music, and shows how Paul Celan's conception of poetic musicality, even in his war-time juvenilia, is steeped in conflict and ambiguity. It focuses on Celan's structures of linguistic interruption and repetition, arguing that the ensuing emphasis on acoustic structure, in collocation with musical thematization. The book addresses the kind of reciprocal mirroring of poetry and music in terms of a metaphorical dynamic.
