She had role models - from Hölderlin to Trakl - and she found a concise, exemplary economical yet never meager language for destruction, dissolution, and upheaval. Her calm did not disguise the unrest but rather made it all the more felt and recognized. Her restraint emphasized her pain, her despair. The poetry of Marie Luise Kaschnitz is always highly personal and yet simultaneously universal. It is characterized by chamber music intimacy. Nevertheless, it exudes an almost alarming effect. It gives us a powerful lesson in silence. Marcel Reich-Ranicki on the death of Marie Luise Kaschnitz.