The Prophetic Mode in Natan Alterman’s Journalistic Poetry

Abstract

Among the large and varied corpus of Alterman’s topical journalistic poetry, a group of poems can be delineated in which Alterman, veering from his customary satirical witty tone, uses high rhetoric, thundering pathos, and biblical drama in order to face such crucial, weighty matters as, among others, the holocaust of European Jewry, the struggle against the British Mandate on the question of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the striving towards the establishing of a Jewish state, and the wars with the neighboring Arab states. These poems constitute what I term ‘Alterman’s prophetic mode’. The article traces the various rhetorical devices Alterman deftly deploys in order to enact a sense of the ‘sublime’, and maintains that it was mainly through these poems that Alterman achieved and bolstered his status as a national poet.