Abstract

The article presents a discussion of Nelly Sachs’ poetics focusing on how her poetry begins «in the Habitations of Death» as a multitude of choruses inside a chorus, choruses of abandoned, recused, wandering orphaned, shadow-cloud-tree-stone-line, invisible, dead and unborn voices. Reading the cycle “Choruses after Midnightµ, the text exposes how all these poetic multi-voiced choruses sing and what they tell about the poetic purpose of a chorus. The article even discusses Sachs’ understanding of chorus in relation to Aristotle’s concept of the tragic chorus and in relation to Diderot’s and Schiller’s poetics of a chorus.