Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (review)

126Philosophy and Literature examples of how Valéry put his theory into practice in his own poems. Through sensuous , musical language each poem represents an aspect of the drama of the intellect, "la conscience de la conscience," as Valéry called it. Christine Crow concludes her study by comparing Valéry's concept of poetry to the Hermetic and Orphic conceptions and to "Heidegger's notion diat not Language but Being speaks dirough us in poetry" (p. 248). This scholarly work makes an outstanding contribution to die study of Valéry's poetry and literary dieory. It will undoubtedly be of interest to linguists and philosophers as well. Ohio UniversityLois Vines Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger, by David Halliburton ; 224 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, $22.50. It is well known diat Heidegger's thinking after Being and Time took a decidedly "poetic" turn. True, there are works like Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and the Introduction to Metaphysics, yet it is fair to say that Heidegger became increasingly philological and poetic, meditating on fragments from the Presocratics, Plato, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl, George, and others. Parallel to the Introduction to Metaphysics in die same year is The Origin of the Work of Art. Increasingly, Heidegger began to see the poetic as the very essence of diinking and thus to listen intensely to diat poet who meditated deeply on the poet's vocation, Friedrich Hölderlin. Language came more eind more to die center of his diinking, and in particular lemguage in die form of poetic saying. Poetic Thinking takes up this essential theme in die later Heidegger. In a series of chapters Halliburton discusses die question of the nature of art, die interesting interchange between Heidegger and the literary critic, Emil Staiger, Heidegger's interpretations of poems of Hölderlin, the essence of drinking, poetic thinking and the "house of being," poetic diinking and lhe fourfoldness ofthe world, and finally the play ofthe world in diinking. This reviewer found Halliburton's book a welcome addition to die works now available on Heidegger. It should be of considerable interest to literary theorists, for it addresses itselfparticularly to Heidegger's poetics, yet in a way that shows diis poetics to be centrally related to what Heidegger calls "thinking" — and thus to his job as a philosopher. Poetry and philosophy come together in the thinking of Heidegger. Halliburton makes the difficult job of translating Heidegger's ideas into English seem much easier than it is, and it is gratifying to find him able to convey a correct interpretation without having to oversimplify and distort Heidegger's diought. Of special interest is Halliburton's tracing of a development within Heidegger's thinking about thinking. The early Heidegger addresses the darker experiences of anxiety and dread in discussing Rilke's Malle Laurids Brigge or Knut Hamsun's The Road Leads On, but in place of this in the later Heidegger one finds "calmness, play, ceremony, the musical, Reviews127 the holy" (p. 141). For "die world, luce Heraclitus' world-fire, now has many meanings, and die context in which it appears is as wide as diinking can make it" (p. 142). Another way to put it is uiat the world no longer belongs to Dasein; radier, Dasein finds that he is part of the world. The "turn" to poetic thinking is part of a more general turn in Heidegger toward an open, celebrative way of being in the world. Halliburton suggests tentatively that Heidegger in his essay on the jug may be "building up a case for a new or revived religious spirit" (p. 174). Parallel to die contrast from darker to lighter mood, from anxiety to openness, there is also, Halliburton notes, a change to images of water and waves radier dian a house of being, suggesting a movement toward simplicity and harmony (p. 197), a "festive unity of die four" (p. 176), a world where mortals also think of the immortals and where "everything hinges on thinking the play of die world" (p. 213). Halliburton is to be commended for an interesting, clear, and well-grounded account of the development of "poetic thinking" in...