The ideas underlying Benn s Ausdruckswelt not only anticipate and parallel many of the assumptions now current in recent trends in literary criticism; they also disclose their ultimate limitations. Benn s poetics were founded on the intellectual crises of the early years of the twentieth century. Following Nietzschean leads, Benn sought to achieve in his person and his work a return to a primitive, archetypal mode of perception which he felt would restore a purer, more natural mentality to modern man, whom he portrayed as being far ahead of his syntax . By focusing on Benn s early...