THE UNORTHODOX MIX of avant-garde and archaic that we find in Sachs's prose and poetry, often taking the form of a simplistic façade masking more complex observations, reflects the person and the poet that her letters and secondhand accounts suggest she was. She famously claimed that she was never a poet, that she was merely a frail woman, that she wrote to combat melancholia or trauma, hat her person was unimportant, and that she wanted to disappear behind her work. Her depiction bears every hallmark of conventional prescriptions for feminine behavior of her era and milieu, and as is the case with so many women who are described this way, there was a great deal more going on under the surface. The artist Sivar Arnér, who was her neighbor, observed that Sachs had many masks to suit the occasion and could take part in serious aesthetic discussions or play the role of the unengaged housewife if the situation called for it. While Sachs's public persona tended to assert, just as she did in the letter to Elisabeth Borchers referenced above, that she was never a poet and ill-suited to academic discussions of aesthetics, the poet Ilse Blumenthal- Weiss noted that Sachs often played host to spirited discussions on literature, among other topics, at her apartment in Stockholm. The variation in style in even her earliest writings indicates that she exercised careful control over every text she wrote, was familiar with a broad range of writers, movements, and schools, and made good use of her bourgeois private education. Though she was very much in control of her work, she usually retreated behind it whenever anyone attempted to initiate a more critical dialogue about her writing (as in some of the exchanges in her correspondence with exile scholar Walter Berendsohn), though she was quick enough to assert her own critical voice if she felt her work was being manipulated (again, with Berendsohn, but also with the composer Moses Pergament, for example). She does conceal herself behind her work; but she is nonetheless actively constructing its reception, and her own.