Poetry and the Question of Modernity - 9781032238913

Taylor & Francis

Interest in Martin Heidegger was recently reawakened by the revelations, in his newly published \u2018Black Notebooks\u2019, of the full terrible extent of his political commitments in the 1930s and 1940s. The revelations reminded us of the dark allegiances co-existing with one of the profoundest and most important philosophical projects of the twentieth century\u2014one that is of incomparable importance for literature and especially for poetry, which Heidegger saw as embodying a receptiveness to Being and a resistance to the instrumental tendencies of modernity. Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present is the first extended account of the relationship between Heidegger\u2019s philosophy and the modern lyric. It argues that some of the best-known modern poets in German and English, from Paul Celan to Seamus Heaney and Les Murray, are in deep imaginative affinity with Heidegger\u2019s enquiry into finitude, language, and Being. But the work of each of these.