The German lyric … cannot, despite all its invocation of the tradition to which it belongs, speak the language which many a sympathetic ear continues to expect from it. Its language has become soberer, plainer; it mistrusts the 'beautiful', it tries to be true. It is, then … so to speak, a 'grayer' language, a language which, among other things, wants to see its 'musicality' settled in a different place, a place where it no longer has anything in common with that 'harmony' which sounded more or less unchallenged, side by side with the most dreadful.

Paul Celan