"Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan are two poets who frame our sense of modern poetry and define the beginning and end of modernity itself. While Baudelaire explores the trauma of the personal shocks of everyday existence, Celan engages with the catastrophic magnitude of the Holocaust. Can we relate the shocks registered in Baudelaire to the historical horror addressed in Celan without denying either the singularity of suffering or the uniqueness of the Shoah? Drawing on trauma studies and Holocaust research, Remnants of Song addresses both the aesthetic dimension of their works and their historical importance. Answering Adorno's famous dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, it shows that Celan's poetry continues to posit its own truth by drawing on Baudelaire as a precedent - yet it does so in ways that have little to do with conventional understandings of history."--Publisher's description.