This volume contains all of Benn's printed poems as well as those that remained unpublished during his lifetime. Benn's poetry articulates the themes of European nihilism in a language whose captivating power has not faded to this day. In 1912, he made his public debut with the shockingly cynical poems of "Morgue," radically rejecting the primacy of reason and history. Between the wars, the wild formlessness of the beginning is replaced by meter and rhyme, through a style in which the "lyric I" follows the tradition of form. Benn's poems capture the material of history in ciphers that align with the "Valse triste," the gesture of farewell, and the mood of life in the "Aprèslude." His aesthetics, which posits the "transcendence of creative pleasure" against the final state of his era, continues to have an immeasurable impact on German literature to this day.