Stramm's radically experimental verse and his major influence on all subsequent German poetry has caused him to be compared to Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, James Joyce, and T.S.

A reserve officer in the Imperial German Army, Stramm was called up to active service at the outbreak of World War I and was killed in action on the Eastern Front.

Against the wishes of his mother, who wanted her son to become a Roman Catholic priest, Stramm joined the German Post Office Ministry in 1893 was rapidly promoted.

[3] After being demobilized, Stramm returned to working at the Post Office and was granted a coveted position as a postal worker on luxury ocean liners making the Bremen-Hamburg-New York run.

[5] According to Bridgwater, "His early work (romantic poetry, painting rather ordinary landscapes, still-lifes, a naturalistic play) was basically unoriginal and derivative.

The first mature plays are complementary opposites: the Symbolistic Sancta Susanna (1912-13)," portrays a Roman Catholic nun who violates her vow of chastity, "while the Naturalistic Rudimentär (1912-14) shows the glimmerings of reason awakening in a Berlin semi-literate.

By 1913, he was on the verge of destroying all his manuscripts when Else Stramm, whose novels had had no such troubles with publication, urged her husband to contact Herwarth Walden, the editor of the avant-garde magazine Der Sturm.

He was receiving submissions from countless international artists, including Oskar Kokoschka, Pablo Picasso, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky.

What Walden had lacked, however, before August Stramm contacted him in 1914, was a German poet "whose work could stand comparison with the international elite who figured in Der Sturm.

Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Stramm "was called up immediately" and was, "posted as a company commander to Landwehrregiment 110, with which he saw action on the Western Front, in the Vosges, and in Alsace.

"[15] In mid-January 1915, Stramm was reassigned, again as a company commander, to the newly formed Reserve Infantry Regiment 272, which was stationed at Oise, near the Somme River in northern France.

"[18] According to Patrick Bridgwater, "While Stramm is known to have enjoyed his peacetime role of reserve officer, he was too sensitive to have any illusions about the war, which he hated (for all the unholy fascination it held for him).

"[20] At the end of April 1915, Stramm's regiment was transferred to the Eastern Front, in order to serve under the command of General August von Mackensen in the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive against the Russian-occupied Austro-Hungarian Crownland of Galicia.

[21] According to Patrick Bridgwater, "Stramm distinguished himself and was at one point acting Battalion Commander, in which role he was involved in the attack on the Russian positions at Ostrow.

"[24] His family later learned that throughout his furlough, Stramm had carried a letter in his pocket which he needed only to countersign in order to be released from all future military service at his publisher's request.

In the end, however, Stramm was, according to Patrick Bridgwater, "unable to accept the alibi of a higher duty to literature," and left the letter unsigned.

[28] According to Patrick Bridgwater, "What is quite extraordinary is that he appears to have found in the hell-on-earth of total warfare around Brest-Litovsk in 1915 the sense of harmony he had sought for so long.

[30] A blood-stained copy of the 1904 German translation of the book "In Tune with the Infinite" (In Harmonie mit dem Unendlichen), by American New Thought philosopher Ralph Waldo Trine, was found in Stramm's pocket after his death.

[31] August Stramm's body was buried with full military honors at Gorodets, in the Kobryn District of modern Belarus, on October 2, 1915.

According to Patrick Bridgwater, "Stramm's war poems are concerned with particulars, with the brute realities, the basic experiences of life at the front.

By eschewing a self-conscious persona, and treating the poem itself as a reality, Stramm thrusts intense images of the war directly before the reader.

"[36] Adler has also written that August Stramm's "essential innovation (still too little recognized in Germany) was to create a new, non-representational kind of poetry," which is, "comparable," to Pablo Picasso's creation of abstract art and to Arnold Schönberg's revolution in the writing of Classical music.

Writing in 1988, Adler commented that, "several younger writers openly acknowledge," that they have been influenced by August Stramm and that his, "place as a modern classic seems to be assured.

"[40] In 1921, Paul Hindemith, a German composer of Classical music and fellow veteran of the Great War, turned Stramm's play Sancta Susanna, about a nun who breaks her vow of chastity, into an opera with the same name.