A Place, Not a Refuge

Katie Peterson reviews “What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt,” translated and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill.

By Katie PetersonDecember 13, 2024

• Poetry

• Philosophy & Religion

YOU ONLY NEED to know the title of Hannah Arendt’s most famous book—The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951—to understand why her work might matter now. Arendt’s winding syntax is famously complex, and her writing voice torqued with intellect, in sentences like these, from the preface: “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” Writing in English, a language she learned working as a summer house cleaner in Winchester, Massachusetts, in a program for refugees, Arendt and her philosopher husband had metamorphosed through Ellis Island in 1941 into American citizens, escaping Axis-occupied Europe where both Jews escaped the dire fate of a generation of others. Arendt brought with her a notebook of poems, written in her mother tongue, German. In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (2024), translator and editor Samantha Rose Hill, with Genese Grill, has given us that rare thing—a testament to what poetic thinking might be, available to all readers, and keenly attuned to our political moment. In their hands, this is less an academic volume than a story well told.

When Hannah Arendt’s archive was opened in 1988, the world discovered Arendt’s youthful love affair with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose contribution to 20th-century thinking has been tarnished (but perhaps not stained) by his membership in the Nazi Party. Another discovery waited in that archive—74 poems bound, for the most part, in two notebooks with an intention as privately focused as Emily Dickinson’s handsewn fascicles. This work should deepen our attachment to Arendt not simply as a philosopher but also as a thinker whose value stands above disciplines, a human person who left a record of a life lived awake and alive. Arendt turned to poetry both for release and for reflection. This book reminds us of what poetic thinking is and why we need it now.

What are the best moments in the poems, and why might they matter? These are love poems and their best moments have to do with longing. Longing means not having—not being satisfied, not getting what you want. You may not need this reminder this particular autumn, but you might be interested in what poetry has to say about longing. Because for a poet, unlike a consumer, such a state isn’t pathological. It’s crucial—a way of knowing. Arendt’s early poems (about Heidegger) are vulnerable, tipping into sentimental: “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 even here we hear Arendt meditating on borders, and countries—aligning the lover with a faraway land, making the poem itself a borderland where strangers meet. This continues in a melancholy stanza from “Summer Song”: “Fields—where no one can hear us. / Woods—where no one can see us. / All is held in strict silence. / We suffer when we love.” The notion that satisfaction must occur in private, and even in secret, generates the poem, but the imagination of a place of exposure follows naturally. Though the poems begin simply with the lover’s voice, sudden conceptual strokes build an inevitable but sometimes unthinking world. The German word for world, “Welt,” became my frequent companion on the left-facing pages: “Hold the weight of my desire. / Life is long without relief. / There are so many lands in this world. / And so many nights under stars.” Welt was an important concept for Arendt via Heidegger’s thinking. But you don’t need to have read the prose of either writer to hear in the poetry the yearning for a place, an environment, in which to have experiences, in which a life can take place—which might be the soul of Heidegger’s concept, made literal by Arendt’s life circumstances as an émigré.

Folk song–adjacent (and adjacent, therefore, to a history of popular music, whose interest in repeating these sentiments persists), these lyrics establish a scene and a mood of intimacy that continues long after (from 1926 to 1941, those precarious years before the war, no poems were found or recorded). I don’t read German, so I was grateful for these extremely clear translations and for Hill’s attention to Arendt’s relationship with German poetry in her introduction. She tells marvelous anecdotes about Arendt’s relationship with poetry, quoting Arendt in an interview: “There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language. […] In German I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart; the poems are always somehow in the back of my mind.” Rainer Maria Rilke’s mood, Heinrich Heine’s images, and Friedrich Schiller’s tone form a forest of references that Hill traces in her careful notes. And yet, so many of the poems were written on American soil—a good reminder of how many writers here, from Aria Aber to Farid Matuk to León Salvatierra and many others, continue to think or write in their mother tongues, and other tongues, as they also write eloquently in English.

What Remains deepens our relationship with the Arendt we know by giving shape to her affections and sorrows. But readers who don’t know her work might be equally moved by the clarity of the claim the poems themselves make. Love poems—and sad love poems, especially—are as common as names. They’re the blood and breath of poetry, where it begins for so many poets (and where it often ends, for how many of those who have written but a few poems have only written sad love poems?). Love poems consider every single part of desire—inception, fulfillment, loss, despair, miscommunication, rage, conflict, what one learns from loss or conflict—to be usable material. Twin to elegy, another form Arendt tried, their secret agenda is always to get the lover loving again, regardless of the absence of the object. The melancholy of Arendt’s early poems has a dense, self-asserting richness deepened by a stern but affectionate pedagogical pose turned mercilessly toward the self, as in a poem dated by the editor to summer 1924:

Go through days without right.
Speak words without weight.
Live in darkness without sight.

I’m in life without a helm

Above me only this vastness,
Like a new dark black bird:
The face of night.

The poems often end in assertions of the will to “survive,” which might grate on those expecting a solution, or a strategy for action. But sad love poems don’t satisfy that urge. They point out instead how assertions of survival work like mantras, changing us despite our fear of being changed. In Arendt’s poems, darkness and the night aren’t bad—they’re the terrain of thinking, the plane of existence, the place we live. A statement like “I’m in life without a helm” stands not just as evidence of despair but also as evidence that one can still be in life, thinking about it, finding one’s place in it, figuring it out.

After the war, Arendt’s poems naturally expand their objects past a person, toward friends and others and a whole world lost, which includes the Europe of her earlier life. A poem about the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who took his life rather than endure capture by the French collaborationist forces, ends in a moving speculation about what the dead have to offer the living. In that poem, the dead are our future, and a part of us, emissaries turned teachers, reversing the power dynamic: “Distant voices, nearby sorrow— / Those voices of those dead, / The messengers we sent ahead, / To guide us into slumber.”

In writing poems, Arendt can understand that a world lost is also a world changed. In what might be the finest poem in What Remains, Arendt uses the tercet, a stanza whose neat three lines naturally imply argument and resolution (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), to investigate that bewildering shift. The physical coordinates of her own journey across the Atlantic pass into poetry, becoming symbolic, soaked with meaning past their material aspects:

This was the farewell:
Many friends came with us
And whoever did not come was no longer a friend.

This was the evening:
Haltingly, it slowed our pace,
And drew our souls out the window.

This was the train:
Measuring the country in flight
And slowing as it passed through many cities.

This is the arrival:
Bread is no longer called bread
And wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

This extremely interesting poem recites—almost sings—a creation story out of loss—and in doing so, it describes what loss makes, not simply what it negates. The first stanza haunts with what might be a double meaning—first, that those who did not come (to the United States) ceased being friends because they could not share a life with those who came, and second, that those who did not come perished (and could not be friends because they could not be).

Arendt often employs structured repetition, a form I have always associated with poets trying to change their minds. The beauty of the last stanza is enriched by Hill’s sourcing of the images of bread and wine to an 1801 German poem by Hölderlin, “Brod und Wein,” but I’d easily teach the poem without that commentary as an example of how anaphora, the rhetorical trick left over from the oral tradition in which the repetition of an initial phrase or line ends in variation, can trigger successively challenging events in the mind and the rhetoric to understand and bear them. Beautiful lines of Arendt’s other poems in the years just after the war testify to how challenging these acts of imagination surely were, but nevertheless, these perceptions have epiphanic clarity, and are framed as continuations, survivals, with perception and memory at the center of the description: “Blessed is he who has no home; he still sees it in his dreams.”

What Remains will offer readers a picture of the sort of thinking Arendt believed could happen in poems. Hill’s wonderful introduction doesn’t simply situate the poems in Arendt’s biography—it deftly evaluates their contribution to Arendt’s body of thought:

In one of her notebooks she asks: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?” She never offers a direct response to this question, but my wager is that if she had, it would have been poetic thinking. All thinking moves from experience, she said, and poetry is the form closest to thinking itself.

It wasn’t that Arendt wrote poems because she was a student of poetry who was taught to write poems, or because she fancied herself a secret poet, or because she felt the muse speaking through her. Though who is to say? Arendt wrote poems because she had found in them a language that allowed her to weave together thinking and experience.

“Experience” doesn’t mean, to Arendt, becoming a socially identifiable spirit, shouting one’s concerns from a rooftop, or asserting the originality of one’s experience. In fact, thinking necessarily makes the thinker recede from public view. The picture of anti-tyrannical thinking indicated here might begin with a quatrain that feels more spiritual than political: “The thoughts come to me, / I’m no longer a stranger to them. / I grow into their dwelling / like a plowed field.” It could continue only with a personal toughness honed by limitation: “When my heart beats now, / it walks on beaten paths, / and I choose from the fields, / what life has granted me.” There is a beguiling, tough candor here—an intimate quality of poetry that poetry could use reminding of—something apart from exhibitionism or performance for others that still reaches out as shareable.

Anti-tyrannical thinking insists, more than anything, on vulnerability. Arendt comes back, a few times, to a thought about poetry—an ars poetica, really—that centers the exposure the poet feels inside the poem. First, in 1955: “Poetic language / is a place, not a refuge.” And then, in 1956, with more grandeur but the same sentiment: “The poetic saga / is a place, not a refuge.” As the love poem makes use of longing, the poem makes use of uncertainty. The poem critiques certainty itself—certainty, that hallmark of bad authority, dictators, and thugs. For Arendt, poetry was a place to know problems, and the world was a place to solve them, which accounts for the unfinished quality of many of these lyrics, their repetition of concerns, and their insistent, if delicate, use of questions, rhetorical and real. In these inclinations, and their verbal forms, Arendt’s poems, taken as a body of work, serve as a reminder that poetry and thinking matter because they aren’t safe spaces.