First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Readers won’t be surprised that Karl Marx was an appalling poet, though they might be surprised by the kind of appalling poet he was. As Philip Wilson tells us in the helpful introduction to this dual-language selection of eleven poems from an extant haul of 120, ‘The young Marx dreamed of a career as a man of letters. He wrote poetry prolifically for two years’, also found time to pen a novel and a verse tragedy, and eventually came to the judicious conclusion that he ‘lacked the talent’. Most of the poems in Evening Hour are tightly formal, wholly conventional, and inherently boring. Wilson is generous in his faint praise: ‘The verse comes across as very competent pastiche: the ballads and the love lyrics ventriloquise Friedrich von Schiller and Heinrich Heine’. The following will serve as an example, and I have not cherry-picked an especially naff passage:

Do you know the magic fulness,
When souls flow out to meet each other,
And pour themselves in exhalation,
In melody and friendliness?

Souls pop up like molehills all over the neat little lawns of Marx’s poems, which is perhaps surprising when one considers his maxim – more memorable than any lines of his verse – that religion is das Opium des Volkes. Indeed, there are few indications in this work of Marx as we know him. The closest he gets, at least in this selection, is a satirical epigram, which begins: ‘In his armchair, cosy and stupid, / Sits silently our German public’. The ...