Even in Germany, the true scope, variety, and force of Brecht’s poetry did not begin to become apparent until after his death and the compiling of the complete editions of his work. And readers without German, after the three-volume Methuen translations published in 1976 and long out of print, have not been in a position to extend and refine their enjoyment and understanding of Brecht the poet. Our translations of a large selection of his poetry, already well advanced, will go some way, we hope, towards giving him his due in America and Britain and throughout the English-speaking world. Meanwhile this volume of love poems will be the forerunner and sign of the abundance to come.

Brecht, like Goethe, was a lyric poet all his writing life. He is known, very properly, for his engagement, as a writer, in the bitter and violent politics of his age, but he should also be known, quite as much as Goethe, as a poet driven by Eros. Like Goethe, Brecht was always more or less in love, and in his total oeuvre love, or let us say Eros, is expressed, discussed, enacted in an astonishing variety of modes, forms, tones, and circumstances. The first person singular in poetry—even in lyric poetry—can only very rarely be conflated with or confined to the person writing the poem. This is well known, but in Brecht’s case it perhaps needs saying again and with some emphasis. In his poetry, no less than in his plays, he is a versatile inhabiter of roles: literary, historical, and biographical, as well as many others, male and female, that he fabricates and tries out in situations that interest him. He is a poet of many personae—which word comes from the Latin personare, meaning “to sound through,” one sense of the word persona being the mask a Roman actor wore and spoke his lines through. The wearing of a mask, the adoption of a persona in poetry, far from serving evasiveness and mendacity, is an effective way of getting at the truth and making it evident. And that is the case with love poems as much as with any other sort.