In the years immediately after Germany's 1945 defeat, Ingeborg Bachmann was clever enough to sniff out a keen opportunity for poets amid the rubble both of her culture and language. This was the chance to participate in remaking the German language itself. Chaucer and Milton, for altogether different reasons, had exploited similar lacunae in English. The result was a vastly more expressive English for Chaucer, and a drastically expanded vocabulary, mostly of new abstract Latinate words, for Milton.

To say that the Nazis and Nazi totalitarianism corrupted the German language during the 12 years of Hitler's rule would be, if anything, to understate the facts. It would be more accurate to say that all words took on political overtones during that ghastly period, and that their often lunatic associations lingered for decades. In some cases, as with famous old folk songs, they persist into the present, over 50 years later. A people may shrug off its own barbarities more easily, it seems, than may its language.

Bachmann, who was in fact an Austrian born in Klagenfurt in 1926, spent her career as a poet, and indeed her life, devoted to this grand enterprise for German, that of renewing its human alertness in poems possessed of a scalpel- clear honesty. In retrospect, what is remarkable about her effort is that it succeeded, or on occasion scaled the heights of isolated brilliance recorded in Peter Filkins's important book. Peculiar professional choices plus flaws in her artistic gift seemed constantly to beset her. She abandoned the writing of poetry, for instance, at precisely the moment of her most lavish public acclaim, turning instead to producing fiction and essays, and nullifying her best chances of developing even more impressive poetic strengths, or of propelling herself into the very front ranks of Modernism. More crippling were the defects of her poetic gift itself. It lacked several essential merits. Over 20 years after her early death in 1973, readers may concede that her poems have neither the gutsy earthiness of a Bertolt Brecht, nor the wit of a Gottfried Benn, nor the rich allusiveness of a Rilke, waking sleeping angels in the soul.