Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics

Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger’s deep engagement with poetry, both situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought from Being and Time to his late writings on language, and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: he claimed that his Erläuterungen (soundings) of Hölderlin’s poetry were not ‘contributions to aesthetics and literary history’ but rather stemmed ‘from a necessity for thought’, which were concerned with Dichtung, the ‘essence’ of poetry, rather than Poesie, ‘the linguistic work in the narrow sense’. And yet, the questions he poses throughout his work have much in common with those that characterize the discipline of poetics as a whole: the value and significance of prosody and trope; the concept of ‘poetic language’; the relation of language and body; the ‘truth’ of poetry. It is in probing these questions in a singular manner that Heidegger’s thinking attains its significance for poetics. Sounding/Silence offers a more nuanced depiction of the relation between Dichtung and Poesie, where poetry’s technical particularity becomes a crucial moment in its ontological vocation. In this, Nowell Smith argues, in transpires that Heidegger is dependent on the very categories of poetics which he had deemed ‘inessential’. At the limits of poetics, Heidegger also confronts in poetry and poetics a limit to his own thinking. Opening up points of contact between Heidegger’s discussions of poetry with the technical and critical analyses of these poems, Sounding/Silence seeks not only to address a lacuna within Heidegger scholarship, but to probe the relation between philosophy and poetry more broadly. In its final chapters it then moves beyond Heidegger’s own thinking to sketch out a ‘poetics of limit’.