Robert Peters lays down a bombshell:

>My criticism of Mahler's Lied is that there is not even one good poem in
>the work...

Wow!  Well, I'm not a native German speaker, so I'm on really shaky
ground speaking about German poetry.  I admit that I get mainly images
from German poems, rather than the music.  The images seem sharper than
in most German poetry, perhaps because the poems are translations from the
Chinese (another language I don't speak).  I'd be interested to know (since
I thought enough of them to do a "literary" translation of them) what makes
them so bad in your eyes.

Steve Schwartz