This book is the first comprehensive study of Gottfried Benns poetry to appear in English. It covers the entirety of Benns verse from his early Morgue cycle 1912 and Expressionist poems through to the anthropological poetry of his middle period to the postmodern Phase II work after the Second World War. Against the background of the poets theoretical writings this study drawing upon the classic texts of Benn scholarship analyzes in detail the major themes of his verse and its distinctive idiom. In particular this work focuses on Gottfried Benns extended process of rhetorical selffashioning his use of classical iconography color motifs and chiffres his often confusing historical semantics the seemingly selfconstituting absolute poem and the colloquial idiom of his late verse. The book also engages with the multiplicity of voices in Benns work and their varied textual forms the hermeneutically variable positions of speech that they articulate and the often contradictory notion of selfhood to which they give rise.