The Gentle Apocalypse

Reviews / Votes

Millington's meticulously researched study provides helpful tools [for reconnecting with Trakl's work] . . . . [It] is a major step forward in-not only English-Trakl scholarship. * Austrian Studies * Millington's book is on the whole a marvelous achievement that makes for an ideal introduction to Trakl for the uninitiated and an important contribution to the field of Trakl studies with an abundance of new insights for those already familiar with the Austrian poet and his reception. * MONATSHEFTE * Anyone working closely with Georg Trakl's poetry will no doubt find it necessary to consult Richard Millington's volume. * GERMAN QUARTERLY * Millington forges a necessary, accessible, and profitable middle path into Trakl scholarship by synthesizing the best aspects of several past critical approaches while avoiding the overly polarizing methods employed by each. * GERMANIC REVIEW * While other scholars have approached Trakl's work chronologically, Millington's study provides a clear through line in Trakl's development as a writer by focusing on the interplay of form and content, rewarding the reader of this study with new insights into familiar poems... Millington's highly readable, insightful, compellingly articulated study is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Georg Trakl's poetry * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES * For readers who already have a deep knowledge of Trakl's work, Millington's superb monograph that combines close textual analysis with wonderfully well informed intra and intertextual readings must come as a welcome answer to many of the stubborn riddles of Trakl's poetry. For someone less familiar with Trakl, this monograph comes as a revelation - a revelation of the intense power and sorrow of Trakl's poetic voice but also of the infinite capacity of the lyric mode to capture the world in crisis and to give an ethical voice to humanity's shared suffering. * LIMBUS *