Footprints

The most important Swiss poet of the nineteenth century, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer is regarded as a crucial figure in the transition of German-language poetry from the Romanticism of Heine, Novalis and Eichendorff to the Symbolism of Rilke and Stefan George.

In poems that took years and sometimes decades to reach a final version, he worked within a limited set of themes and images – high mountains, gloomy lakes, sinister boats, nocturnal ghosts, reflected clouds, dark woods, golden sunsets, lightning, harvesting, lost lovers – to present his own symbolic world with a vividness and intensity that few poets can match. In these sensitive and accurate versions by acclaimed translator Anthony Mortimer, Meyer’s achievement is available to anglophone readers for the first time.