INTRODUCTION

This forum examines two great and, by now, quite famous poems from the 1960s entitled "Psalm," both of them written by poets who were Jewish. The Rumanian poet Paul Celan, who wrote in German, included his "Psalm" in his collection Die Juemandsrose (The No One's Rose) (1963), and the American poet George Oppen included his in his collection This In Which (1965). Celan's "Psalm" is clearly marked by the Holocaust, though as Carsten Dutt, one of the forum writers, points out, it is not specifically on the subject of the Holocaust. Oppen's "Psalm," somewhat ironically, bears as an epigraph a passage from Thomas Aquinas (viaJacques Maritain). Two of the scholars included in the forum, Robert Baker and Peter Nicholls, stage an encounter between Oppen and Celan, while the two others, Dutt and Kevin Hart, focus solely on Celan's "Psalm." God is present in Celan's "Psalm," but as "no one" (Niemand). He is absent from Oppen's "Psalm," but, as Baker and Nicholls emphasize, Oppen's poem is nevertheless a song of praise. Whether Celan's address to "no one" is an address to the God of negative theology becomes a subject of dispute in the forum: Hart tends to agree, Dutt disagrees, and Nicholls takes a position that could allow for either interpretation. All four of the participants engage in close readings of the poems while setting them in a variety of literary, philosophical, and theological contexts.