- Person
- Yehuda Amichai
- Lived
- 1924–2000
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- German-born Israeli
The story
Yehuda Amichai wrote in the colloquial Hebrew of everyday life and was known as the poet who plays with words. The scholar Robert Alter has described his poetry as a play of sound, in which one word seems to generate the next through their phonetic kinship. That musicality, together with the directness of his images, has made his poems especially appealing to composers.
Many of his poems have been set to music in Israel and in other countries. The composer Mohammed Fairouz set Amichai's poem Memorial Day for the War Dead for solo voices, chorus and orchestra in his Third Symphony, turning a meditation on Israel's day of mourning for its fallen soldiers into a large-scale concert work.
Others who have set his words include Elizabeth Alexander, whose setting takes its text from his line about a fist that was once an open palm with fingers, as well as David Froom, Matthias Pintscher, Jan Dušek, Benjamin Wallfisch, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, Maya Beiser, Elizabeth Swados and Daniel Asia. Settings like these allow his poems to be heard in concert halls by audiences who may never have read them in Hebrew or in translation.
His words continue to find new listeners in unexpected places. In 2025 Pope Leo XIV recited lines from one of his poems, without naming the poet, in his Christmas address Urbi et Orbi at the Vatican, placing them within a message of compassion and hope in a time of war; the reference was widely reported and appears in the official text of the address. In February 2026 the Irish rock band U2 released an EP, Days of Ash, which includes a reading of Amichai's poem Wildpeace by the Nigerian artist Adeola of Les Amazones d'Afrique.
Musical settings have carried Amichai's poetry to audiences who might never open a book of verse. A symphony built around a poem about the war dead shows how his words can serve as a shared language of mourning, and each new setting gives his Hebrew lines fresh life in performance, in many languages and for listeners of every background.
Why it matters
Musical settings of Amichai's poems have carried his message of love, grief and peace to audiences far beyond the printed page.
About Yehuda Amichai
Würzburg-born soldier-poet who wrote modern Israel’s love, war and doubt in everyday Hebrew, becoming its most widely read and translated poet.
More about Yehuda Amichai
- Yehuda Amichai brought everyday Hebrew into poetryWith his first collection in 1955, Yehuda Amichai became one of the first modern poets to write in colloquial Hebrew, turning prosaic subjects into poetic images.
- Yehuda Amichai's novel faced his German childhoodYehuda Amichai's 1963 novel Not of This Time, Not of This Place follows a young Israeli born in Germany, drawing on the poet's own life.
- Amichai's Open Closed Open was praised as deeply spiritualYehuda Amichai's late book Open Closed Open won high praise from poet Anthony Hecht, who called it as deeply spiritual a poem as any he had read in modern times.
- Amichai's poems were translated into some 40 languagesYehuda Amichai's poetry has been translated into some 40 languages, and Ted Hughes called him one of the most essential poetic voices of the century.
- Yehuda Amichai taught literature in Israel and abroadYehuda Amichai taught literature at an Israeli teachers' seminary and to students from abroad at the Hebrew University, and was poet in residence at New York University in 1987.
Sources
- Yehuda Amichai Wikipedia
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