Hans Magnus Enzensberger is one of Germany’s most important poets, as well as a provocative cultural essayist, a highly influential editor and one of Europe’s leading political thinkers. His poetry’s social and moral criticism of the post-war world owes much to Marxism, yet insists on the freedoms often denied by Communist governments; like Orwell he maintains that satire and criticism should not be party-political. Born in 1929 in the Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren, he grew up in Nazi Nuremberg. He studied German literature, philosophy and languages at the Universities of Elangen, Freiburg im Breisgau and Hamburg, and in Paris at the Sorbonne, completing his doctorate in 1955 with a thesis on the poetics of Clemens Brentano. At Freiburg the philosopher Martin Heidegger was an influential figure, but Enzensberger found him ‘disagreeably authoritarian’. He then worked as a radio editor in Stuttgart until 1957.

British industrial manufacturer.

Odysseas Elytis (1911 – 1996) was regarded as a major exponent of romantic modernism in Greece and the world. In 1979 the Nobel Prize in Literature was bestowed on him.

Paul Éluard’s poetry is concerned with sexual desire and the desire for social change. A central participant in Dada and in the Surrealist movement, Éluard joined the French Communist Party to work actively in the Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. Caught between the horrors of Stalinism and post-war, right-wing anti-communism, his writing sustains an insistent vision of poetry as a multi-faceted weapon against injustice and oppression. For Éluard, poetry is a way of infiltrating the reader with greater emotional awareness of the relational and social problems of the modern world.