Thinking in Twilight: The Poetry of Hannah Arendt

Kelly M.S. Swope on What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt

Asher Brown Durand, The Stranded Ship (1844) | The National Galley

Poets of hard times distinguish themselves by their night vision. That is Friedrich Hölderlin’s argument in his “Bread and Wine” elegy from 1801. Nightfall, not just on the day at hand but on the times in general, is the poem’s theme. The first stanza opens at eventide in a bustling commercial city. It is still too early for lamps or for stars. Bourgeois merchants, sated by their gains at the marketplace, rumble home in their carriages to supper. The rathaus watchman, perched in his belltower, sounds the end of the week’s civic business. Behind a third-story window, a plump child dressed for recital practices her violin, while in the public garden, an old widower shuffles down the stone walk with squinting eyes. All round, the city comes to rest. As the moon rises, wisteria scents a twilight fog; feathered feet churn a glassy pond; then night arrives, full of stars.

Held up to Hölderlin’s gaze, the waning day—and metaphorically, the darkening age—seems anything but onerous. Indeed, there is something like splendor in this late-evening set-piece, but as the poet gazes deeper into the exalted night, he discerns a crisis of meaning that furrows the placid surface of things. The businessman in his carriage has nothing but balance sheets on his mind: his measures for value—economy, utility, profit—cannot measure up to anything divine. And the old man in the garden longs for more than his dead friends’ company: his thoughts grasp for a life-world in which the presence of the gods is immanent, the very blood in the canals, not the transcendental firmament spoken about in lecture halls and worship houses.

Hölderlin confides that he does not know what to say for a world from which the gods have fled. All the gods are alive, he explains, but “over our heads, in a different world.” There is nothing to do but abide hopefully through the night for signs of their return. Yet the gods’ indifference is total; they care not whether mortals even are. They condescend to their human underlings with mercy and aversion, like a feudal lord regards his suppliants.

The underlings, for their part, exhibit all sorts of morbid symptoms without understanding what ails them. The tempting abundance of the modern marketplace turns them into smug hedonists who tally everything as gain or loss. Around them they perceive, not the mounting costs of their barbarism, but the potential for increasing production, for siphoning more money out of men and machines, their sense of time exactly apace with the pistons pulsing in their satanic mills. “And meanwhile,” writes Hölderlin, “it seems to me often / Better to sleep than as now to be so companionless.” The German original is so ohne Genossen zu sein, literally to be so without comrades. The gods’ flight from the world is an event that shatters the old bonds of human solidarity. Modern busybodies consume their leavened breads and mellowed wines, but without any true companions with whom to savor them. Their loneliness increases in proportion to their interdependence. The more they cooperate in matters of production, the less they suffice in matters of fellowship.

The task for the poet of hard times is to look into the deepest part of the night without recoiling at what he sees, and then, somehow, to sing for the return of the divine. Hölderlin’s elegy shows that such a task is twofold. The first step is critical: the poet has to discern how, in the commonsense of the times, poverty could take the form of plenty, misery that of contentment, and dying off that of living on. To do this, he must tarry with the beauty that others perceive, even delight in their same delights, while speaking frankly about their depravity. His critique succeeds to the extent that he is able to expose their crisis without emptying their lives of all value. The second step is speculative: the poet has to gaze beyond the known for new values that could satisfy thought’s inmost drive for meaning. His speculations succeed to the extent that the new values he actualizes are already nascent within the dying day. “So come!” writes Hölderlin, “that we may see the Open, / seek out and find our own, however distant it may be.”

To read Hölderlin retrospectively is to be reminded of thought’s vocation in times of mass thoughtlessness. The “Bread and Wine” elegy survives as a riddle for later generations. Rainer Maria Rilke picks it up over a century later in his Duino Elegies, yet without Hölderlin’s religious hope that the appearance of a Dionysian Christ could make men comrades again. The poet of Duino Castle places his hopes, rather, in something even more down-to-earth than the Incarnate Word—human language, or more specifically, “saying.” What the public poet says are the names of the things that have been losing their place in a world of incessant ontological upheavals. Saying the names of near-to-hand things—tree, brook, house, bridge—restores their auras and transforms the earth once more into something ideal. “[T]hese passing things, / seem to need us,” Rilke argues, “to put themselves in our care / somehow.” And we in turn need things to furnish our life-worlds. Saying their names, conferring on them an invisible being in thought, helps us to hold on to them through every difficulty. A restored chthonic connection between thought and things imparts meaning on our mortal existence and repairs the maimed relations among men.

What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt Translated and Edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill Liveright, 2024. 208pg. $22 (hardcover)

Rilke ripens Hölderlin’s riddle for an even later hour when human beings can look neither to gods nor things for self-renewal. In the twenty-first century, the divine and the chthonic reappear in their most debased forms yet: the gods as monotheistic fascisms dressed in dazzling ironical garb; things as same-day deliverables destined for the ocean floor. Our crisis is beyond a Hölderlin or a Rilke’s conception: not the gods, not things, but human species-being itself – the totality of relations that make us viable earthly creatures—is in radical flux. As the twin forces of attentional expropriation and world destabilization spread thoughtlessness around the globe, few common tables remain for breaking bread and drinking wine together. On the attentional side, smart technologies so permeate conscious experience that there is almost no cognitive capacity left for the silent dialogue between me and myself. Mass digital networks foster a form of solitude that is something baser than loneliness. If loneliness at least shows the psyche’s pro-social need for belonging, then solitude shows the psyche’s power to cut off all but the most necessary ties. The subjective realm that thought needs to flourish scarcely exists. On the objective side, meanwhile, climatic revolutions so jeopardize our earthly relations that there are no more stable life-worlds to nurture human bonds. Population displacement and market crashes recur in ever-shorter and ever more damaging cycles. Birth brings little hope, death little resolution, and education, although more available than ever, fails to grow vital minds. Human beings are willing to outsource the labor of saying to algorithmic machines because we have grown indifferent to whether what we say is true. The common realm that thought needs to flourish scarcely exists. These are hard times even for poets who can see at night.

Although Hannah Arendt died in 1975 without having witnessed the digital or climatic revolutions, her experiences taught her much about the breakdown of the private and public realms, and by implication, the breakdown of thought. European totalitarianisms and their global outgrowths caused more damage to the human intellect than any other historical development in her lifetime. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) present the moral catastrophe of Nazism as a story about the disappearance, virtually overnight and on a mass scale, of the human capacity for judgment. Adolf Eichmann, the disgraced Nazi bureaucrat who supervised the transport of millions of Jews to death camps, has become the symbol of that judgmental collapse—which, among other things, involved reflexive trust in the party hierarchy, a sycophantic deontology, and a stunted imagination—but the phenomenon, according to Arendt, implicated even Germany’s university intellectuals, most notably her former teacher and lover Martin Heidegger, who drifted along with fascism from its first days, unlike his more thoughtful student, who understood that Nazism was a danger not just to Jewish people but a threat to the very practice of philosophy.

Arendt’s lifelong preoccupation with thoughtlessness adds context to her late reflections on the life of the mind. She writes in the opening pages of Thinking that thoughtlessness abets many modern evils (bureaucratized murder, foremost), and she wonders whether thinking could somehow stop human beings from evildoing, perhaps by fulfilling their basic need for meaning (since evil is senseless), or by preparing the will to put up some resistance to tyranny (since evil is without a sound conscience). Thinking fosters autonomous judgment, unmaking the inherited categories that stifle the mind’s free movement, such that, in times of unprecedented crisis, when there are no clear indications that wrong is wrong (indeed when wrong appears to many as right), the mind does not default to pat formulas but responds spontaneously to what it perceives. This may sound like philosophers’ talk—Immanuel Kant’s three critiques inform much of the framework—but the kind of thinking that Arendt has in mind here is poetic in nature.

In poetry, thought actuates its power to associate previously unassociated ideas and thereby to open new horizons of discernment. Poetry employs the imagination to make absent objects vitally present, an operation analogous to the empathic cathexis that happens in moral deliberation. Above all, poetry brings thought as close as it can get to language’s primordial elements. Poetic thoughts are untranslatable from the mother tongue. “There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language,” Arendt writes; “Bread is no longer called bread, and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.” This does not mean that poetic sense is totally incommunicable from one language to another, just as the thoughts of one mind, although irreducibly subjective, are not totally incommunicable to another mind. Arendt wants to draw attention to the deep identity formation that occurs in one’s first language. She knows of no substitute for growing rich roots in that natal soil. “For myself I can put it extremely simply,” Arendt says. “In German I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart; the poems are somehow always in the back of my mind. I can never do that again.”

We know now that Arendt the public intellectual was an occasional poet – in private. Samantha Rose Hill, translator and editor with Genese Grill of the new book, What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), declares that “[Arendt’s] poems were her private life” and were “among her most prized possessions,” shared only with intimates like her husband Heinrich Blücher and her friend Kurt Blumenfeld, to whose letters she sometimes appended bespoke songs. By the author’s own account, her poetry notebooks— she filled two of them with 71 poems written across four decades—are a record of “the free play of thinking,” an activity that for her was distinct from, yet complementary to, her prolific public writing from the 1940s on. Arendt’s vigilant preservation of a body of work that was never to see the light of day is at first difficult to square with her writerly persona. The itinerant professor was never one to back away from public discourse, and when controversy inevitably found her, she faced it resolutely (as in the aftermath of the Eichmann book), yielding only when her interlocutor offered the better argument (as when Ralph Ellison questioned her judgment of the Little Rock Nine). She was a courageous thinker who took up the most inscrutable moral problems of her times as her main themes, and yet, she never sought to become a poet of her times like a Hölderlin or a Rilke, both of whom she could recite by heart. Why not?

The reason was not that she could not have been one, had she wanted to be. A close friend of renowned poets like Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden (the latter of whom once proposed a platonic marriage to her), Arendt would have had no difficulty getting her poems to a literary press. Readers today will find her poetry notebooks worth reading for no other reason than that she is a canonical political theorist with much to teach us about the genealogies of present-day authoritarianisms. In truth, Arendt the poet exhibits a real though not illimitable talent, a mind whose natural tilt is toward prose but which has a second-natural command, acquired through years of faithful recitation, of the volkslied and the ode. She invents well enough in her German Muttersprache that the poems, by no fault of her devoted translator, do not render easily in English (that is how you know they are originals, Hill says). From her earliest years, her poems are about her melancholic inner life, her great loves and losses, her most treasured friends, her memories of erotic bliss. The best among them are the ones that adopt traditional lyrical forms, adhering to stanza structures and rhyme schemes that lend musicality to her deeply felt yet obscurely expressed emotions. In a handful of her later poems, Arendt takes on general social themes, and these are, surprisingly, some of her least felicitous efforts, both in language and in form. In them, one detects the public poet’s affirmative criticality—the darkening world is still beautiful to her eye—but not his speculative consolation—never do the unactualized values of the future appear. Arendt comes much closer to the public poet’s elegiac mode in certain shining passages of The Human Condition or The Life of the Mind, where she writes in the dominant medium of her mature decades – argumentative English prose. Even in Arendt’s prose, however, the speculative moment never arrives. Apparently, Arendt did not believe it her task to describe what Hölderlin calls the “common measure” (ein Maß, allen Gemein) of human solidarities to come. As a public writer, she assumes the perspective of the judging spectator looking backward and inward, not the searching prophet looking forward and outward. A chip off the block of German Romanticism, Arendt rejected the tradition’s normative messianism.

What could Arendt’s private poetry contribute to her public vocation of thinking about thinking? To answer that question, we have to begin where Arendt, following Hölderlin’s example, always begins—in twilight. In The HumanCondition, twilight is the metaphor for privacy that derives from publicity’s “harsher light.” Enclosed subjectivity, although parasitic upon the lighted world, permits the imagination to play freely among silhouettes. Yet thinking in private imperils common sense. A light from outside must break the dark if thought is to hold on to its sense of reality. Common sense relies upon public relations where the sun shines on everything and ideas have a more durable existence. Yet thinking in public is perilous in its own way. A mind given over totally to publicity thinks in unreconstructed slogans that cannot interpret new facts except through pre-approved patterns. Arendt is highly sensitive to thought’s dual need for free play on its own and for plural interplay with other minds. She regards her private writing, therefore, not as a means for achieving her public writing’s higher ends, but as part of an integrated thinking practice that treats poetry and philosophy as coequal moments in the life of the mind. Poetry breaks down when darkness loosens the mind’s categories into nonsense; prose implodes when the transparent word forgets its own shadow. Just as the public poet Hölderlin could not help but write down fragments of philosophy in his private notebooks, so the public philosopher Arendt could not but write down fragments of poetry in hers.

More than a metaphor for privacy, twilight is the mood of Arendt’s entire poetic output. Her poems of the 1920s, featured in Part I of Hill and Grill’s translation, show a young mind constantly withdrawing from the diurnal world into a melancholic dreamscape that expands inward as night falls. Grouped together, these early poems tell a story of a poet in search of consolation for an overwhelming weariness whose cause is obscure to her. Hill is a savvy guide through the intertext of Arendt’s youthful imagination, pointing out the poet’s allusions to Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Nietzsche’s Gay Science, and, in one place, quoting a letter Arendt received from Heidegger, who apparently thought of himself as her comforter during this period. A poem titled “Weariness (Müdigkeit)” begins with the image of night falling (Dämmernder Abend) around a poet who “can no longer hold / What I used to love… / Nothingness conquers me– / It’s just life’s way.” Hill hints that Arendt may have enclosed this brooding poem, authored in the summer of 1925, in one of her own love letters to Heidegger, who replied to her soon after: “But I may be permitted to ask you, dear, not to fear such ‘weary’ hours and days, and not to let them become something for you only, something that does not belong to me as well?” Subsequent poems indicate that Arendt’s Schwermut is not of the sort that inauspicious love can cure. It is the default existential mood of a great soul wading through its own “gray flood” without stable moorings, as in this untitled poem from 1924:

Geh durch Tage ohne Richt.

Spreche Worte ohne Wicht.

Leb im Dunkeln ohne Sicht.

Bin im Leben ohne Steuer

Über mir nur Ungeheuer

Wie ein grosser schwarzer neuer

Vogel: Das Gesicht der Nacht.

*

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 line, “I’m in life without a helm,” testifies to the vertigo of Arendt’s inner voyages. Time and again, as she plumbs the murky reservoirs of her mind, she reports of losing her bearings, of “sinking” and “rising” in the half-light of a dusk (Abenddämmerung) or a dawn (Morgendämmerung). Unmoored any longer to the known, the poet oscillates between an abyss of meaninglessness and an open horizon of new meanings:

Dämmerung, Tröstende,

Mildernde, Heilende,

Dunkles Weisende,

Neues Umkreisende,–

*

Dusk, consoling,

Soothing, healing,

Revealing darkness–

Encountering newness–

The free play of thinking in twilight is full of dangers and consolations. “The night envelops me,” Arendt writes in another poem of late summer, “soft as velvet, severe as misery.” The last of her youthful poems, composed in 1926 when Arendt was twenty years old, is titled, appropriately, “Nightsong (Nachtlied).” By every measure—the rhyme scheme, the musical meter, the plain elegance of the language, the developed theme—it is the most perfect poem she would ever write. In it, the themes of her adolescent years culminate into an ironical insight that hearkens back to Hölderlin’s praises of the exalted night. “Still the night shows us silently / the same dark signs,” Arendt begins:

Sie muss stets dasselbe sagen

Auf dem gleichen Ton beharren,

Zeiget auch nach neuem Wagen

Immer nur, was wir schon waren.

Laut und fremd verlockt der Morgen,

Bricht den dunklen stummen Blick,

Gibt mit tausend neuen Sorgen

Uns dem bunten Tag zurück.

 *

Night must always say the same thing,

Always sing the same note,

Showing in new ways

We only are what we already were.

Morning light loud and strange,

Breaks the dark and silent show,

Returning us to the colors of day

with a thousand new troubles.

With the help of the nocturnal graces, the poet formulates here, for the first time, a dialectic that would surface again decades later in her philosophical works. It is that between the night’s recurring sameness—the twilight in which the mind escapes external determinations, only to discover the limits of self-determination—and the day’s relentless troubles—the human condition of having to share a plural world with inscrutable men who do not see eye-to-eye with you. As a young poet and a mature philosopher, Arendt resists any speculative resolution of this dialectic. “The shadows are our home,” she declares near the end of her night song, as if hinting that we retreat into the twilight’s enchantments when our daytime troubles become too much.

A long and conspicuous silence marks the middle period of Arendt’s development as a poet. From 1926 to 1941, she took down no new poems, or at least none that survived the series of upheavals during which she had to flee Nazi Germany and traverse over mountains and rivers to Prague, Geneva, and then Paris, where she worked for eight years helping Jewish youth escape to the British Mandate of Palestine. Then, when Paris was no longer habitable for Jews, she fled to Marseilles and Lisbon and finally to New York City, where she would stay, on and off again, for the rest of her life. According to Hill, Arendt put the 21 poems she had written in the mid-1920s “into a suitcase containing her birth certificate, passport, marriage documents, doctoral diploma, correspondence, and manuscripts” and carried them with her for every stage of the journey. Considering how little she must have been able to bring with her at the most dangerous junctures, such as when she escaped with forged papers from the French internment camp at Gurs, or when she passed through the Spanish territory where her friend-in-exile, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, took a fatal dose of morphine to elude the Franquistas, there can be no doubt that Arendt placed an incalculable value on her poetry notebooks. Like the German songs she committed to memory as a child, they traveled with her everywhere.

The poem that broke Arendt’s 15-year silence is an ode to Benjamin titled “W.B.” She composed it in 1942, shortly after trying but failing to find her friend’s grave at Portbou, Spain. The verses are a remarkable testament to Arendt’s rich life in her mother tongue, for even though she had not written a German verse in many years, she was able to produce a form and meter on level with her most inspired Nachtlieder. As if picking up right where she left things in the 1920s, the mature poet, seasoned by a decade of political displacement, reverts to thinking in twilight:

Einmal dämmert Abend wieder,

Nacht fällt nieder von den Sternen…

Liegen wir gestreckte Glieder

In den Nähen, in den Fernen.

*

Eventide descends once more,

Night falls down from the stars;

We stretch our limbs, reaching out

To those near, and those far.

As the verses continue, Arendt hears the “gentle whispering melodies” sounding out of the darkness around her, likening them to the “voices of the dead” who have gone ahead to prepare the way for the living. “We listen so we can let go,” she writes, “[f]inally breaking rank.” The stinging loss, through death, of the solidarity she had with Benjamin and other German Jews in exile, lingers on in many of her later poems. The very next one she penned is an anti-fascist reprise of the German national anthem “Das Lied der Deutschen”—a chant fit for a mass resistance movement that never was. Years later, in The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt will lament the puniness of the efforts, both domestic and international, to push back against Hitler’s government. Her reprised national anthem indicates that, as a private poet, writing for herself, she hoped for grander solidarities than what she had known firsthand.

As a philosophical recorder of history, however, writing for the reading public, she judged most modern expressions of mass solidarity (ethnonationalism, religious fundamentalism, class-based unity, and so on) with circumspection if not suspicion, including, even, certain aspects of Israeli national solidarity that she considered to be uncritical. For Arendt, to think publicly was to operate somewhere between alienation and alignment—independence over ideology, civility over sentimentality, solidarity with the idea of universal humanity over that of any particular political movement. (Eichmann, she argued, should have been tried in Jerusalem by an international tribunal; not, however, for “crimes against the Jewish people,” but for “crimes against humanity, perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people.” To her, the difference mattered immensely, both for legal precedent and for historical memory.) A direct allusion to Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” elegy in an untitled poem may reveal Arendt’s positionality as a private poet better than any other in her notebooks. Here are the first and last stanzas:

Dies war der Abschied:

Manche Freunde kamen mit

und wer nicht mitkam war ein Freund nicht mehr…

Dies ist die Ankunft.

Brot heisst Brot nicht mehr

und Wein in fremder Sprache ändert das Gespräch.

*

This was the farewell:

Many friends came with us

and whoever did not come was no longer a friend…

This is the arrival:

Bread is no longer called bread

and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

The hour is once again late evening (Dies ist der Abend, one of the middle stanzas begins), and the poem, written just two years after the war’s end, works through the poet’s memories of many farewells and many arrivals. The farewell is for friends and ex-friends alike. The last line of the first stanza in the German original has a chiasmic internal rhyme structure that gets lost in the English version (und wer nicht mitkam war ein / Freund nicht mehr). It winks ahead at the final two lines (Brot heisst Brot nicht mehr / und Wein in fremder Sprache ändert das Gespräch), which describe the foreignness of the destination where the poet must now sit down to eat and drink. Arendt is contemplating human solidarity here, where it is and is not, and whether it travels across the chiasmus between the familiar and the alien. If friends with whom we say bread and wine in our mother tongue can follow us to foreign lands, even after we have said farewell to them, then can new friends appear around new tables, even if we cannot taste the names of their delights with equal gusto? The poem engages this question meaningfully because it acknowledges that solidarities feel thickest on one’s natal soil and in one’s mother tongue. What, then, has the poet given up on arrival? Perhaps a few friends who were not really friends after all; perhaps the main thread of the public conversation; perhaps her intuitive grasp of the bread and the wine. But not everything: the conversation has changed, but it has not broken off. There may still be things of shared value to discuss around the table.

What these things are, the private poet does not say, and likely does not know. Unlike Hölderlin’s public elegy, Arendt’s unpublished “Bread and Wine” does not try to discern the unactualized values that could rehabilitate human solidarity amid total societal collapse. The critical moment is present, but not the speculative one. The poem sets more modest parameters for poets of hard times. First of all: poetry’s task is to turn thoughtlessness into thought, not to redeem the whole fallen world. Second: whatever the next human values are, they are not the old values; foisting traditional sources of meaning upon a world that can no longer keep them authentically alive is a sin against friendship. Finally: where human language holds on, even just by a thread, even if not in your mother tongue, the conversation continues. A wiser Hölderlin might have told the gods good riddance. Do not let yourselves be swallowed in the chiasmus.

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Kelly M.S. Swope is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Thomas More University in Covington, Kentucky. He has written on a variety of topics in a variety of forums. His review essays have appeared in Full Stop; his peer-reviewed research in Studies in Philosophy and Education; and his opinions in Times Higher Education. He is the creator of the documentary podcast series, Life on the Ark: The Zanesville Animal Catastrophe a Decade Later (available on Spotify and Apple). Kelly lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.