"His heart cries out, but his poetry doesn’t”

Creating Style in the Poetry of David VogelDavid Vogel

Abstract

The moderate, slow and quiet poetry of David Vogel (1891–1944) is unique in the landscape of Hebrew poetry, and continues to attract readers and critics even a century after its first publication. Vogel concocted his poems from a unique linguistic blend that over the years has been defined as both simple and grim, but despite the thematic emphasis on death and despair, his poems are tender and even harmonious in their way, maintaining a delicate balance between gloom and airiness; between movement and repression.
The current study strives to point out the linguistic and thematic foundations of Vogel’s poetic style, using the tools of modern linguistics. It suggests that Vogel’s style is a product not only of components present his works, but equally of those which are not, but are ubiquitous in the works of his literary counterparts. Reading Vogel’s work reveals that the absence of these elements has a definitive role in creating the moderate effect his poems have on his readers, for example the lack of neologisms, complex grammatical structures, titles, and more. This paper identifies these various elements in the book Before the Dark Gate (Mahar, 1923), especially the themes, the semantics, the syntax, the structure and the graphics, and compares them to the literary norms of Hebrew poetry in the first decades of the twentieth century. Along with extensive samples of the works the study also quotes from Vogel’s personal journal and his lecture “Language and Style in Our New Literature” (1931), to illuminate his poetic views.