An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl, a poet of intense inner vision and originality whose work stands alongside that of Yeats, Valery, and T. S. Eliot. The distinctive tone of Trakl's work--especially admired by his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein--is autumnal and melancholy. Trakl was writing at a time of spiritual and social disintegration on the eve of the First World War, when personal values and perceptions tended to be subsumed in a more generalized anguish and exaltation.