A poet first and foremost, Bertolt Brecht's genius was for language. However, because this language is built upon a certain bold and direct simplicity, his plays often lose something in the translation from his native German. Nevertheless, they contain a rare poetic vision, a voice that has rarely been paralleled in the 20th century.
Brecht was influenced by a wide variety of sources including Chinese, Japanese, and Indian theatre, the Elizabethans (especially Shakespeare), Greek tragedy, Büchner, Wedekind, fair-ground entertainments, the Bavarian folk play, and many more. Such a wide variety of sources might have proven overwhelming for a lesser artist, but Brecht had the uncanny ability to take elements from seemingly incompatible sources, combine them, and make them his own.
In his early plays, Brecht experimented with dada and expressionism, but in his later work, he developed a style more suited his own unique vision. He detested the "Aristotelian" drama and its attempts to lure the spectator into a kind of trance-like state, a total identification with the hero to the point of complete self-oblivion, resulting in feelings of terror and pity and, ultimately, an emotional catharsis. He didn't want his audience to feel emotions--he wanted them to think--and towards this end, he determined to destroy the theatrical illusion, and, thus, that dull trance-like state he so despised.
