"Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all but unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets' contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition. Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses."--.

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Poetizing and Thinking
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 1 On the Poetical Nature of Philosophical Writing: A Controversy over Style between Schiller and Fichte
  • “Only a matter of style”
  • Reciprocal Action and Schiller’s Notion of Aesthetic Freedom
  • The Role of Imagination in Philosophical Discourse: The darstellende Schriftsteller
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 2 Fichte and Schiller Correspondence, from Fichte’s Werke, Vol. 8 (De Gruyter)
  • 287.2
  • 288 (Sch. 241)
  • 291c (Sch. 243)
  • 292 (Sch. 244)
  • 298a (Sch. 249)
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 3 Hegel, Romantic Art, and the Unfinished Task of the Poetic Word
  • Art, Truth, and Work of Language
  • The So-called End of Art and Its “After
  • Romantic Art as Infinite Task
  • Don Quixote as Image of the Relevance of the Romantic
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 4 Who Is Nietzsche’s Archilochus? Rhythm and the Problem of the Subject
  • Between Poetry and Philosophy
  • Archilochus and the “Birth of Tragedy” Out of the Spirit of Lyric Poetry
  • On Rhythm
  • New Souls
  • On Metrical Necessity and the Military School of Life
  • Sex and the Lonely Poet
  • Subjective Deception
  • Conclusion: Once More: On Doing Things with Words
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 5 Untimely Meditations on Nietzsche’s Poet-Heroes
  • Introduction
  • Heroism as Beautiful Death: The Apollonian Legacy of Homer
  • Nietzsche’s Other Poet-Heroes: Poetry as Vocation
  • Euripides: Anti-Hero or Last Hero?
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 6 Heidegger’s Ister Lectures: Ethical Dwelling in the (Foreign) Homeland
  • Hölderlin as the Name of an “Other” Beginning of Thinking
  • Dwelling in the Intimacy of Truth as Oppositional Harmony
  • Tragedy and the Definition of the Human Being as “Katastrophe”
  • The Language of Contradiction: Oxymoron and Tragic Manifestation
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 7 Remains: Heidegger and Hölderlin amid the Ruins of Time
  • Introduction
  • Concluding Remarks
  • Notes
  • References
    • I. Works by Heidegger
    • II. Works by Hölderlin
• Chapter 8 The Poietic Momentum of Thought: Heidegger and Poetry
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 9 Learning from Poetry: On Philosophy, Poetry, and T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 10 An “Almost Imperceptible Breathturn”: Gadamer on Celan
  • The Poem and the Moment
  • The Poem and the Reserve
  • The Poem and the Hope
  • Conclusion: The Inspiration of Poetry
  • Notes
  • References
• Chapter 11: Hölderlin’s Empedocles Poems
  • Empedoclean Sorrow
  • Hölderlin—Empedocles
  • The Death
  • Notes
  • References
• Contributors
• Index