Heinrich Heine, the great German-Jewish poet and essayist, spent the last eight years of his life almost completely paralysed and bedridden in his Parisian apartment — the period he called his 'mattress grave.' While his primary diagnosis was spinal muscular atrophy, Heine also suffered from various infections during this period, and he died in Paris in 1856. His late poems, written from this immobile existence and full of pain, irony, and erotic longing, are among the most remarkable achievements of nineteenth-century European verse.

Heine's 'mattress grave' poems — written by a man whose body had been reduced to immobility by disease — represent the ultimate confrontation between the poetic imagination and bodily suffering. The experience of being confined to a bed, prey to disease and possibly to the insects that inhabited Victorian Parisian apartments, gave Heine's late poems their characteristic mixture of suffering, irony, and defiant wit. His example influenced subsequent generations of poets who wrote from beds of illness, from Keats to Paul Celan, and his work stands as a monument to the creative capacity of the body under siege.