It is arguably impossible to represent Heidegger’s concept of poetry by means of a collection of summarizing propositions. His writings on poetry are in the first place contemplations. They have a performative character, which requires the reader to think along actively in order to disclose their meaning. Heidegger develops his notion of poetry by interpreting and comparing a handful of poems and passages from poets’ letters as a way of giving the floor to language itself.Footnote 1 The possibility of presenting the proper meaning of his account of poetry without the original poems in their actual discussion remains rather questionable. According to Walter Benjamin , to quote a text implies interrupting its context, which holds true in general for any form of representation of someone else’s words and thoughts. Hence, the interpretation runs the risk here of merely talking about passages without being able to transmit the original thought. But the latter is presumably the risk of language itself. Heidegger writes in this regard:

The unlimited possibility of a report like derivation of originary saying entails that language constantly endangers its own essence and remains, as such, in itself dangerous, the more unconditional, the more essential saying is.Footnote 2

Much will be lost by an interpretation of an interpretation. All the more if Heidegger, as we will see, calls Hölderlin’s poetry itself already an interpretation (Auslegung).Footnote 3 Hence, to a certain extent violence seems inevitable in interpretation and representation. Nevertheless, we will make an attempt at sketching Heidegger’s contemplative walk through poetry, admittedly represented from the site of thinking, but hopefully provoking a genuine dialogue with poetry. Our main focus here will be on the philosophical conditions that urge Heidegger to step aside from philosophy as metaphysics , in favour of an engagement of thinking with poetry and, secondly, on Heidegger’s concept of poetry in relation to the openness of presence as aletheia.

Heidegger’s speaking about interpretation is from the outset ambiguous. In a wide sense, interpretation can be that of the meaning of Being, but in a strict sense the interpretations of individual poems as well. Heidegger never became explicit on this ambiguity, which must, however, be inevitable when the interpretation of poetry is, on the one hand, taken as a model for the hermeneutics of Being and, on the other hand, the essence of the poem and any given piece of poetry cannot be disclosed without ontological considerations. A similar ambiguity can be experienced, in one way, in Heidegger’s speaking of poetry as poíesis, an ontological revealing occurrence that takes place in each manifestation of Being, due to which things, works of art and philosophical thoughts can have a poetic character, and, in another way, in the deployment of poetry by means of the founding poets. However, this is a vocation that is, in Heidegger’s view, sparsely distributed among the poets, to the extent that maybe only Hölderlin can be characterized as such, which leaves the poetic origin of the present German language, the German people and a pre-Hölderlinian area completely obscure, but to which Hölderlin’s poetry makes an appeal nonetheless. Certainly, the German being that is prepared by Hölderlin concerns a futural notion and the Greek existence was founded, according to Heidegger, by Homer and Sophocles, but this does not satisfy the gap that is left between poetry as an ontological notion and its enunciation by so few founding poets. The ambiguity has its say only indirectly in Heidegger’s works when he discusses the relation between thinking and poetry and the place of the poem among other works of art. He argues in On the Origin of the Work of Art that the poem as a linguistic work has a privileged position among the arts. Poetry plays a fundamental role in art because of the founding-revealing character of the poetic word. Although the poetic does not simply coincide with a linguistic structure, Heidegger suggests that the poetic is, nevertheless, most present in a linguistic work. However, this statement is later put into perspective in the same work. He writes:

Poetry is thought here in such a broad sense and at once in such an intimate essential unity with language and the word, that it must remain open whether art, in all its modes from architecture to poesy, exhausts the nature of poetry.Footnote 4

The ambiguity between poetry in strict and broad senses leads us immediately to poetry as an ontological notion, showing itself as the ambiguity between Being and the entity. In essence, poetry is historically determined and belongs therefore to the timing of Being. Poetry has therefore the character of an occurrence, which has been on its way throughout history. Hence, we cannot compare and determine it merely as an object among other objects. We will call the ontological perspective on poetry ‘onto-poetology’. The ontological character of Heidegger’s reading of poetry becomes most apparent when he writes about the poetry of Hölderlin:

The poetic approach to his poetry is only possible as a thoughtful confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the revelation of Being won in this poetry.Footnote 5

Around the same period in 1934, Heidegger writes:

Poetry and thereby proper language, takes only place where the reign of Being has been brought into the superior untouchability of the originary word.Footnote 6

Succinctly, he writes again on the thoughtful poetry of Hölderlin in What Are Poets For? (1946)Footnote 7:

But there would be, and there is, the sole necessity, to experience by soberly thinking what is unspoken in what is said in his poetry. That is the course of the history of being (Sein). If we reach this course, it will lead thinking into a onto-historical dialogue with thinking.Footnote 8

Regarded as an ontological occurrence, poetry must be held far from its conception as a merely imaginative representation of the real or an expression of lived experiences of the soul. Such notions render poetry only something unreal (Nichtwirkliche), Heidegger argues.Footnote 9 He writes in contrast:

The rose blossoms in the poem of the poet and only there, but this ‘blossoming’ is not simply that which is said according to some supposed reality, entity, but only this is whatever is (das Seiende).Footnote 10

Heidegger first becomes explicit on the nature and relevance of poetry in a lecture from 1934–1935, entitled Hölderlin’s Hymns Germania and the Rhine . He addresses here the case of poetry indirectly by starting with a negative determination of poetry as a way of de(con)structing its common conception. Concerning an interpretation of poetry that seeks the sense of poetry outside the poem, Heidegger first attacks poetics conceived as aesthetics. He asserts that poetry is no reassurance for swooning little girls, no stimulation for aesthetes who think that art exists for enjoyment (Genuß) and pleasure.Footnote 11 The basic relation to a work of art is not that of mere enjoyment as the ‘shuffling movements of the soul’ or the ‘ripple of nice feelings’.Footnote 12 Heidegger cites in this regard from a letter from Hölderlin to his brother in which Hölderlin speaks about the influence of fine arts on the development of the people. Hölderlin complains that poetry is generally not regarded as a serious matter, but merely as play and recreation.Footnote 13 Accordingly, Heidegger argues that poetizing means, in contrast with its ordinary conception, the ‘awakening’ and the ‘discipline’ of one’s own being, by means of which one reaches back into the ground of one’s own existence.Footnote 14 This formulation echoes Heidegger’s earlier cursory determinations of poetry, emphasizing its disclosing character with regard to the human existence. He writes in Being and Time : ‘The communication of the existential possibilities of attunement, that is, the disclosing of existence, can become the true aim of “poetic” speech.’Footnote 15 In a like manner, Heidegger had written two years earlier:

It is thus that discourse, above all poetry, is able to let release new possibilities of the being of Dasein. In this way it preserves itself positively as a mode of temporalization of Dasein itself.Footnote 16

Hence, poetry concerns the possible granted by time. Heidegger writes in the same year as the publication of Being and Time :

Poetry is nothing but the elementary emergence into words, i.e. the becoming uncovered of existence as being-in-the-world.Footnote 17

At any rate, the understanding of poetry is to be held far from mere play. A poetic interpretation requires ‘bright seriousness’ (helle Ernst), according to Heidegger.Footnote 18 If poetry is to be discussed in terms of beauty at all, it has primarily an ontological meaning.Footnote 19 In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger writes about Hölderlin’s poetry:

Its saying consists in its own truth. It is called beauty. Beauty is a sending (Geschick) of the essence of truth, whereby beauty means the un-concealment of self-concealedness (die Entbergung des Sichverbergenden). Beauty is not that which is enjoyed, but that which is subjected to any epoch (Geschick) of truth that takes place when the eternal inconspicuousness (Unscheinbare) comes to the most irradiating way of appearing (erscheinendste Scheinen). We must comply with letting the poetic word be in its truth and in beauty. Which does not exclude, but rather includes that we think the poetizing word.Footnote 20

Secondly, Heidegger attacks a philosophical form of poetics. Philosophy is commonly known for the cold audacity of its concepts, which subsequently can be applied to poetry.Footnote 21 Here the danger lurks, according to him, not of talking too much, but of thinking too much. A philosophical analytical approach would convert the poem into a set of related concepts, in which one seeks solely philosophical opinions and doctrines and explains a poet in terms of a presupposed philosophical system. But Hölderlin’s poetry has nothing to do with such a general and common proceeding, Heidegger argues. Moreover, such an interpretation would in philosophy not be welcomed at all, since philosophers will consider the dialogue with poetry to be a helpless aberration into fantasy (Schwärmerei).Footnote 22

Thirdly, Heidegger criticizes the conception of poetry as a form of literature. If poetry is counted with literature, it will either be denied as a ‘playful languishing’ or a ‘fluttering away into the unreal’.Footnote 23 In this way, poetry will be denied in its essence as the mere flight into the idyllic and its value will be estimated only by measure of the present as actuality. But the actuality, in turn, is produced and steered by the organizations that form social and public opinions nowadays, which is the literature business, according to Heidegger. Albeit being propelled themselves, authors in this business become ‘officials’ (Funktionäre) as ‘boosters’, and poetry comes to appearance solely as literature. Heidegger argues that if poetry is culturally or scientifically considered, it will be the object of the history of literature, and Western poetry is collected nowadays under the rubric of European literature.Footnote 24

Fourthly, and in line with the aforementioned critique, Heidegger criticizes the metaphysical schema of form and content. The metaphysical distinction is commonly regarded as universal, but, according to him, it is historical and in fact Greek.Footnote 25 The content of a poem can be reported without effort by summarizing some topics, and their forms and relations, such as verses, can be counted easily. Forms in poetics can be regarded as the visual images by means of which the abstract content can be expressed. The eagle represents, for instance, the abode of the gods, or a dreamy child represents Germany, and so on. Subsequently, one could compare such representations with the annunciation to Mary by the angel and compare different artistic historical transfigurations of this motif. Afterwards, one can inquire into the eagle form in the works of different poets, for example Homer or Stefan George, somewhat like the camel is studied in Arabic literature, Heidegger argues.Footnote 26 He speaks obviously with irony here. At any rate, he makes no effort to hide his disdain for comparative literature and writes at one point that historical uniqueness can never be proved by the history of literature.Footnote 27 What is uttered in a poetic saying has no content, according to Heidegger, but is ‘formed’ (gebildet) or brought forth.Footnote 28 As such, it has the character of an occurrence instead of an analysable object. Dryly, he concludes that analyses and inquiries into forms and similarities of content generally result in nothing.Footnote 29

Fifthly, Heidegger argues that poetry should not be regarded as a mere expression of feelings. Poetizing is not before anything else something that occurs by means of the faculty of imagination, as if the poet makes a visual image of inner and outer feelings and lived experiences (Erlebnisse).Footnote 30 In accord with this conception, ordinary poetics is able to describe the soul of the poet with the aid of depth psychology and distinguishes types like the epic poet, the lyrical poet or the dramatist. The misconception of poetry as the expression of lived experiences is based on the thought that poetry is the expression of the soul, whether individual or collective. As such, a cultural value is often ascribed to poetry as well.Footnote 31 But poetry is, in Heidegger’s view, not essentially a cultural expression that, for instance, can be found alongside other arts or sports.Footnote 32 Heidegger refutes the concept of poetry as cultural expression by means of a joke, which is, however, quite uncommon in his writings. Humour is in particular not one of the dispositions that he had at his disposal and cracking a joke does not really correspond with the aforementioned stance of ‘bright seriousness’, although Churchill’s saying that a joke is a very serious thing might be worth contemplating in this context. Heidegger quotes the Nazi author Kolbenheyer , who wrote ‘Poetry is a biologically necessary function of the people’, and remarks that it does not take much intelligence to notice that the same holds true for the digestive system, which is especially healthy.Footnote 33 Subsequently, Heidegger mentions how Oswald Spengler regards poetry also as an expression of the cultural soul. But the production of bicycles and cars belongs in Spengler’s view to the cultural soul as well. Nevertheless, this determination is superficial and not essential, according to Heidegger, since it fundamentally regards poetry as a human activity and especially an individual one, which he characterizes therefore as ‘liberal’.Footnote 34

Heidegger indicates poetry in a formal sense and rather from the side of thinking as a ‘saying in the way of a showing revealing’ (weisenden Offenbarmachens).Footnote 35 He argues that the determination is not proposed as a final definition, but has only an auxiliary function to provide a better understanding of Hölderlin’s poetry.

However, the etymology of the German word for poetry, Dichtung, points also in the direction of poetry as a saying that shows and reveals. Dichtung comes from the Old High German (OHG) tihtôn, according to Heidegger, and is related to the Latin dictare, which is a strong form of dicere, meaning ‘saying’.Footnote 36 Dictare means ‘to say something again’, ‘to prompt’, ‘to dictate’, ‘to compose something linguistic’, ‘to draft’, whether as essay, message, treatise, complaint, petition or song. Dictare means to write down, to say in advance (vorsagen), to be written down, to say something that has not been said before.Footnote 37 It is only since the eighteenth century that the word dichten has been limited to the type of drafting of a linguistic structure that we call ‘poetic’, Heidegger reports.Footnote 38 He concludes that, however, etymology provides no clue of what kind of saying poetry is. To oppose the ‘poetic’ to the ‘prosaic’ would lead back to the Greek poiein, poíesis, to ‘produce’ as a ‘bringing forth’, related to the OHG tihtôn; which direction, however, is even wider, according to Heidegger. Poíesis is a way of bringing forth by letting something arrive in its own essence, which might occur in saying, but also in making and producing and in an originary sense even in creation as physis. Subsequently, Heidegger argues that tihtôn has a similar root to the Greek deiknumi, meaning to ‘point out’, to ‘show’, to make something visible or public according to its own way. Conclusively, etymology demonstrates that poetry is a way of saying as showing. As such, poetry belongs to the revealing of truth. But propositions, arguments and syllogisms are also ways of saying and showing, which leaves open the question of what kind of saying and showing poetry is, and how poetry as a way of truth presences, essences, founds and grounds.

Heidegger seeks therefore to find a determination of poetry in and from poetry itself, and consequently gives the floor to the poet. In view of this task, this poet must be a poet who knows and poetizes what poetry itself is. This poet is Friedrich Hölderlin, according to Heidegger.