FOR LITERARY HISTORIANS of the early twenty-first century surveying the trends and achievements of the age of revolutionary artistic innovation of a hundred years before, Trakl's poetry arguably stands out less for what it is than for what it is not. His place in the most progressive current of German-language literature appears, at first glance, beyond question; it is evidenced, for example, by the appearance of his two books with Kurt Wolff Verlag, publisher of the most boldly unorthodox works of a new generation of writers. Yet the adjectives that might typically be used to describe the work of his fellow innovators—rebellious, provocative, satirical, iconoclastic, nihilistic, ecstatic, ironic, playful, mischievous—touch at best on marginal aspects of his. Unlike so many canonical works of what we now know as the classical avant-garde, Trakl's poetry does not present itself as a challenge to the literary tradition; instead it seeks to reimagine a certain strand within it, attune itself to it, and stylize itself as its final instantiation. What sets it apart is that rather than deconstructing an established worldview, it is more concerned with constructing a new one, and it does so by combining, reinterpreting, and building upon elements of the cultural and literary heritage that it implicitly lays claim to, whether these derive from biblical stories or classical myth, the religious and social history of Central Europe, the work of like-minded precursor poets, or a deep sense of connectedness to the natural world and landscapes in which the poet's own cultural community is embedded.

In light of its affirmative intent, twenty-first century readers might be tempted, at second glance, to question just how progressive Trakl's work really is, or even to view it in similar terms to the ones in which Karl Ove Knausgaard has recently described Dostoevsky, one of the writers whose influence was most important for the formation of the poet's attitudes to both literature and life. Knausgaard characterizes the Russian novelist as “a deeply reactionary author, firstly in the fact that he was searching for meaning, in all seriousness and with eyes open, secondly in the fact that he was searching for it not in politics or in ideology, in science or in philosophy, but in religion, and that he found it there, in simplicity.”