Everyday Language is a Forgotten Poem
Heidegger: Beyond Reactionary and Progressive
Heidegger writes:
“Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.”
What does it mean?
Damon Linker renders it this way:
I agree with Linker that Heidegger, especially from the ’30s on becomes more reactionary, more Spenglerian, and more pessimistic about modernity. The history of thought is a history of “forgetting.” We live in the time of Being’s “oblivion.”
But I don’t think crankiness is what Heidegger is up to in this passage, so allow me to render it in a more generous light, and in a light more consistent with his work, overall, including his magnum opus, Being and Time.
“Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language.”
Heidegger is saying that poetry should not be thought of as simply normal speech with fancy frills, be it rhyme, meter, imagery, ornament, or sonic beauty. The difference between poetry and normal speech is not to be found in the things taught in Introduction to Poetry class. To think that poems were better when they followed more rules is a mistake. The problem with focusing on poetry in terms of “craft” is that it misses the ontological dimension in favor of the “ontic.” It’s too caught up in a scholasticism of categorical definitions.
Heidegger, here, follows Plato, who writes that a doctor isn’t simply someone who knows how to give out drugs, but knows how to give them out in the right dose to the right person in the right context. Likewise, a poet isn’t someone who knows the mechanical pieces of a poem, but someone who knows how to use them appropriately, organizing them to a higher end.
“It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem”
The notion that Everyday language is a forgotten poem is not simply reactionary. It’s also a point we find in Buber, for whom “I-It” descriptions are parasitic on original moments of I-Thou connection. We find it in Rosenzweig, who describes Revelation as the mere appearance of the divine, and Scripture as the hardened commentary on that experience. We find it in Luther’s view of tradition, whereby the crystallization of established ways blocks the individual relationship with God cultivated in faith and “conscience.” We can still criticized Heidegger for this Protestant definition of poetry, but it’s arguably more progressive than reactionary. The point is not to pine for ancients, but to cultivate a renewed relationship to language. The first step in that cultivation is the realization that everything in our midst has the potential to be poetic, if only we knew how to hear it in the right way.
Far from criticizing free verse, Heidegger’s arguments are aligned with the poetics of the Beats. Frank O’Hara’s Having a Coke with You finds poetry in everyday life and everyday language. There is no prescribed path for finding poetry in everyday life, except this: first realize that, initially and for the most part, we speak and think un-poetically. Thus, simply paying attention to everydayness can transform it. In secular parlance, we might call this “mindfulness.” Poetry is a mindfulness practice of and in language; watching the language go by, and becoming one with it, letting language carry us until it opens us to the mystery of its source—this is “poetry proper.”
The stuff of poetry awards and publications, the stuff of MFA programs, that’s all part of the sociology of poetry—“poetry improper,” if you will.
“there hardly resounds a call any longer.”
The sound of the poetic in the everyday is rare and faint, but not extinct. Heidegger’s message is hopeful if ambitious. We have an opportunity and a summons to hear poetry even where it seems gone. This is a task not for professional poets, but for anyone. Poetry is not a career any more than prophecy is a career. It might be that for some but that is not the essence of poetry. Likewise, the true poem is not a product, an aesthetic work, but life—life as experienced poetically.
If modern language is a wasteland, the solution is not a return to the glory of the Greeks, but a retrieval of the pre-Socratic sensibility now, in the modern world. The Pre-Socratics were at once thinkers and poets, scientists and myth-tellers, interpreters and teachers—the unity of their endeavor was made possible by their resistance to formalization and “logic chopping.”
The trouble with modern poets and modern philosophers is the same—the narrowing in scope of what each thinks comes under their domain, rather than the realization that poetry connects to everything, for it deals with the medium of all understanding and communication: the word.
P.S.—I’m delighted to share a new episode of Meditations with Zohar, in which I talk to philosopher and classicist Zena Hitz about authenticity, faith, learning for its own sake, moral fragility, Socratic irony, how to save the humanities, and much much more.