Green Mountain and Love

Uri Zvi Greenberg’s early poetry, composed between 1912 and 1923, offers both a key to understanding his later work, and a means for re-conceptualizing modern lyrical discourse in general and modern Jewish lyrical discourse in particular. Often callow, this early work testifies to the poet’s quest for a way of writing poetry that would give voice to the Jewish experience in Europe just before and after World War I. Like many other Jewish poets of the period, Greenberg was aware of the pressing need to express Jewishness in a way that would allow for the continued existence of Jewish national identity, among nations jostling for independence in a Europe rife with tensions. Similar to many of these poets, Greenberg also knew that this expression would have to be, of necessity, grounded in modern subjectivity. Paying attention to the various literary, historical, and political contexts of Greenberg's writing, Green Mountain and Love traces the poet’s valiant attempt to come to terms with modern subjectivity, and in so doing, reinvestigate the mechanisms of modern lyrical discourse. It yields fresh insights into the nature of poetry; its aims and functions in the cultural, political, and historical arenas; and the reader’s relationship with the poetic word.