Brian Dillon
In seventy-four poems by Hannah Arendt, a document of the
philosopher’s interior life.
What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt,
translated and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill,
Liveright, 172 pages, $26.99
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For much of her life, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, best known today for The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her reporting and reflections on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, wrote poetry that it seems she never thought to publish. Arendt’s poems, of which seventy-four survive, were discovered when her friend and literary executor Mary McCarthy opened her archive in 1988, thirteen years after Arendt’s death. They had been carefully typed, bound, and arranged chronologically—by year but also by season, as if that explained a summery or wintry mood in this or that poem. Perhaps it did; in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translators and editors Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill contend that her poems were not just private in the sense of being unpublished, but part of her interior life: a regular (but interrupted) practice alongside notebook entries on favored poets such as Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
What Remains reveals, or confirms, Arendt’s status as a poetic thinker: a description she used of others, including her friend Walter Benjamin. A poem is for Arendt a thought or arrangement of thoughts, and in her own poems, what she is thinking about is, first of all, feeling and second (for better and worse) poetic language itself. One of the chief interests of the mid-1920s pieces is assuredly how she writes about and to Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a relationship when she was an undergraduate and he was her professor at the University of Marburg. The Heidegger who emerges here—she kept all his letters, he kept almost nothing—is at once a profound inspiration and a fretful, distant egotist: “Why do you give your hand to me / Shy and like a secret? / Do you come from such a faraway land, / That you do not know our wine?” But although she can come across as sentimental, Arendt is also thinking about desire, death, melancholy, and the consolations of nature—and how to fashion a metaphor-laden language to do it all justice.
Unfortunately, much of Arendt’s immature verse is “poetic” in aspiration more than effect. “The Subway,” from 1924, commemorates the arrival of Berlin’s S-Bahn rail system, and strains to conjure the sights and sounds of this new chthonic modernity: “Out of the darkness, / Snaking toward light, / Swift and ablaze, / Narrow and crazed.” This is an adjectival train wreck, quite remote from the visionary clarity of Benjamin’s One-Way Street (1928), with its curt, bright odes to gas stations, office equipment, and fire alarms. Unalike, too, the stark but haunted image-world of Ezra Pound’s 1913 “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” As the editors of What Remains point out, Arendt was not a poet of the things themselves: “Her language, never pointillist, is more like the stroke of a palette knife.” The early poems especially are smeary with the stock hues and forms of Romanticism, which are named rather than painted—time, dreams, beauty, sorrow, joy, night, dusk, pleasure, pain. “The night envelops me / soft as velvet, severe as misery.”
In the spring of 1926, Arendt moved to Heidelberg University to study with Karl Jaspers, and if her archive is to be believed, she stopped writing poetry for the next sixteen years. In 1933, she escaped Nazi Germany for Paris, where she worked for the Jewish refugee organization Youth Aliyah helping young people escape to Palestine. (Later, in her writing on the Eichmann trial, Arendt criticized what she saw as the declared moral exceptionalism of the state of Israel—leading to her ostracism among American Zionists.) In 1941, she fled to Spain en route to the US, stopping at Portbou, just over the border, where the previous year Benjamin had committed suicide when his refugee party was told to turn back (the others were allowed to travel the following day). Among her papers, and in What Remains, the first poem since 1926 is dedicated to Benjamin, and haunted by this and other unbearable deaths: “Distant voices, nearby sorrow— / Those voices of those dead, / The messengers we sent ahead. / To guide us into slumber.” Benjamin had entrusted his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” to Arendt before he set out from Paris; Benjamin as messenger sent ahead is twin to his own “angel of history,” bearing witness to past destruction as he speeds into the future.
Exiled in America, Arendt worked as a housekeeper in Winchester, Massachusetts while she learned English, then began to establish herself as an intellectual in New York. No surprise that her poems of the 1940s are populated by specters and littered with ruins. In 1943: “There are so many memories / Rising from still ponds of the past. / Ghosts drawing circles around me, / imprisoning me, leading me on.” And three years later: “I know that the streets are destroyed. / Where are the wagon tracks, miraculously unscathed, / Shining forth from ancient ruins?” But her gaze also turned on the city where she found herself, among strange voices, food, music, drinks—Arendt would become well-connected and socially at ease, but when it came to liqueur time of an evening, the Americans were still in another room with the harder booze. There is a shade of the younger, melancholic, slightly posturing poet in her verses about Riverside Park, where drivers head “Swiftly toward death” and young lovers stroll past “Bearing the burden of Time.”
A variable collection, then: hard to think of a twentieth-century philosopher whose poetry matches their thought in prose; and this in an age of highly poetic philosophers and philosophical poets. Arendt surrounded herself with poets in the US: she was close to Robert Lowell (who dedicated to her a poem in his book Imitations) and the disheveled W. H. Auden, whom she tried to convince to buy a second suit. She never in public attempted to compete with the poets whose work and conversation encouraged her to become an anglophone essayist. But What Remains is nonetheless an essential if minor document in Arendt’s search for (as she put it in a notebook) “a way of thinking that is not tyrannical.” Poetry was for her the closest thing, even if she was condemned to prose.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence: An Education.