Death of Virgil

"The Death of Virgil (1945) constitutes a marked advance, or prolongation, in the direction indicated by the philosophizing parts of ...earlier work, though with this difference: that the reflections of the dying Virgil, while equally abstract, are largely unargued, they proceed less by logic than by what alas is called 'poetry'....In form The Death of Virgil consists of almost continuous interior monologue, in sentences so long that their beginnings are forgotten before their ends are known....Broch's prose poetry is rather similar to Rilke's poetry deprived of most of what makes it poetry....The main subject for speculation here, the meatiest bone in a voluminous soup of words, is art, beauty, or poetry--and those grave doubts about the prpriety of art which loom large in German writing, from Goethe and before to Thomas Mann and after."Broch, Hermann is the author of 'Death of Virgil', published 1995 under ISBN 9780679755487 and ISBN 0679755489.