The Poetry of Thought (review)

This is not Steiner’s magnum opus; but then, it is a late work. It traverses familiar ground, often evoking its textual landmarks with extreme concision. Each chapter exhibits a certain unity but derived from organizing principles so various (and elaborated at such variable length and intensity) that the book barely attains a roughly chronological integrity. Thematically, its asserted focus on style’s shaping role in philosophical programs repeatedly shifts toward poetry’s substantial presence in philosophical texts; its advertised investigations of the poetic dimensions of thought persistently veer toward thinking as a preoccupation of literature; and its claims more often read like markers for work than records of it (each another of its author’s unwritten books). And yet . . . every so often, the canonical cultural cards are reshuffled so as to forge and elaborate connections (concerning Hegel’s resistance to intelligibility or Wittgenstein’s outsideness to English) that make it impossible to regret the labor of reading Steiner’s book.