“SEINE DREIFALTIGE SEELE trug er in der Hand, / Als er in den heiligen Krieg zog. // — Dann wußte ich, er war gestorben.” Else Lasker-Schüler wrote these lines in a heavily theologized tribute to fellow poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914) a year after his early death. They draw attention to one of several important distinctions between the Austrian Trakl and the Berlin-based expressionist contemporaries with whom anthologists and scholars have often associated him. Emotional coolness in the articulation of horrific or terrifying scenes is a common feature in the poetics of such leading representatives of “dark” or “apocalyptic” expressionism as Georg Heym or the young Gottfried Benn, even if with both these writers acute existential anguish lies just beneath the steely surface of their works. Trakl's verse conveys a similar sense of historical crisis and impending doom yet embodies a singularly explicit emotional response, as if the poet were carrying his heart upon his sleeve, or as Lasker-Schüler puts it, his “soul in his hand.” This response is also consistently bleak, registering variations along a scale that extends from contemplative melancholy to outright despair. The centering of Trakl's emotional range within these limits is reflected in the tendency among commentators to identify him, for example, as “the melancholiac of Salzburg.”

Historians of affective psychology associate this scale with thinkers of the Aristotelian school, who consider it the natural emotional range of “all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts,” with a fertile melancholic disposition at the moderate end giving way to pathological states — depression, epilepsy, palsy, lethargy — at the other.