Morgue and Other Poems

Morgue and Other Poems (German: Morgue und andere Gedichte) is a 1912 poetry collection by the German writer Gottfried Benn. It is a booklet with nine expressionist poems, the first six of which are the Morgue cycle, which describes images and incidents from a morgue.^[1][2]

Published in 500 copies in March 1912, in the series lyrisches Flugblatt from Berlin's A. R. Meyer Verlag, Morgue and Other Poems was the debut book of Benn, a 25-year-old medicine student.^[3] It was widely discussed by literary critics upon publication and has continued to inspire a large amount of analysis. Its cold, eerie atmosphere and descriptions of sickness and decay have led to comparisons to Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire. Richard M. Meyer [de] connected its imagery to Pieter Bruegel's depictions of Hell. For the 100th anniversary in 2012, Klett-Cotta Verlag [de] published an edition with original illustrations by Georg Baselitz.^[4]