Cultural Sources of Verse: A Poem by Eugen Gomringer

Eugen Gomringer’s poetry of the 1950s and ‘60s was strongly rooted in such elements of contemporaneous culture as Swiss concrete painting, the Swiss style of typography, the functional design of the Bauhaus tradition, and the Stuttgart-based modern theories of aesthetics. Some of these practices were the basis on which Gomringer constructed his own poetic means, while others were directly implemented in the layout or cover designs of Gomringer’s poetic books. In this paper the sources of Gomringer’s verse are examined with special reference to the book 33 konstellationen and the mathematical verse construction of one poem, “worte sind schatten,” whose structure proves to be paradoxical, simultaneously complicated yet simple.