Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, _Heidegger and the Politics of the Poetry_, trans. Jeff Fort

 THE SAME FRIEND who recommended Agamben’s Holderlin’s Madness (which I have yet to read) lent me this, and it is one of the most interesting books I have read in a while.

My best shot at explaining what is going on here: Heidegger is one of the 20th century’s most articulate apologists and advocates for poetry—see in particular his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger sees the great poet as a kind of prophet, a vates, giving sensible form to the divine. Moreover, the (genuine) poet speaks his (or her?) people into their identity, their being as a people. Homer gave form to Greekness, spoke the Greeks into being. (Heidegger here following Hegel and Herder, I guess.) 

For Heidegger, the German poet was our man Friedrich Hölderlin.

The problem: Heidegger was a Nazi. His most passionate declarations about poetry and about Hölderlin come from the mid 1930s and early 1940s, a time when Heidegger was still closely allied with Nazism, although perhaps not as closely as he had been in. The early 30s. So…is there something a little too Nazi-like about Hölderlin, some toxic tendency insidiously entwined in the beauty? For that matter, is there some toxic tendency in poetry itself, at least the poetry that tries to step into the prophetic mode, that has the largest ambitions?

The whole question hits me where I live, as I am a longtime reader and, yes, admirer, of the Hiberno-Anglo-American modernists, who tended to have such ambitions. Think of Yeats and his relationship to Irish nationalism, of Joyce (or Stephen Dedalus) forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, of Pound’s hope to make The Cantos  a modern Sagetrieb, of Eliot in Desert Father mode. Joyce avoided drifting towards the authoritarian right, but the other three…urgh.

Lacoue-Labarthe does a deft job of getting Hölderlin out of this snakepit, with an assist from Walter Benjamin. But any poetry that traffics in what L-L calls “national-aestheticism” (which usually involves, upper-case-M Myth and setting out to be your people’s Homer)…look out.

Lacoue-Labarthe shed some new light on post-modern poetry for me, in that he made clearer why I sense what feels like a renunciation, an implicit disavowal of ambition, in poets like Ashbery, a kind of “no, thank you” to anything Heideggerian (or national-aestheticist, to use L-L’s term). 

My problem then gets reconfigured as: I actually like it when poets swing for the fences, so to speak. But can  they do that without succumbing to the snakepit?