Sounding/Silence

Sounding/Silence charts Heideggers deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: He claimed that his Erluterungen (soundings) of Holderlins poetry were not contributions to aesthetics and literary history but rather stemmed from a necessity for thought. And yet, the questions he posesthe value of significance of prosody and trope, the concept of poetic language, the relation between language and body, the truth of poetryreach to the very heart of poetics as a discipline and indeed situate Heidegger within a wider history of thinking on poetry and poetics. Opening up points of contact between Heideggers discussions of poetry and technical and critical analyses of these poems, Nowell Smith addresses a lacuna within Heidegger scholarship and sets off from Heideggers thought to sketch a philosophical poetics of limit.