What Remains

After moving to the U.S. in 1941, philosopher and historian Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism) joined a circle of poets including Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, but her own poems “remained part of her private life” until after her death in 1975. “It is unknown whether she ever tried to publish them,” translator Hill remarks in the introduction to this illuminating collection. Arendt’s work on totalitarianism and her direct experience of escaping Europe are reflected in her poems, which are also in direct, at times allusive conversation with the German poets she treasured, including Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke. Their strength lies in their tenderness and self-exposure, including in some entries believed to be about her romance with Martin Heidegger: “Oh, you knew the smile with which I gave myself to you./ You knew how much I had to keep secret,/ Just to lie in the meadows and be with you.” Fracture, dislocation, and exile are themes: “I stand in no country,/ I am neither here nor there.” An elegiac tone also pervades: “But how does one live with the dead? Say,/ where is the sound of their company.” These unsparing, literate, and surprisingly candid poems offer a fascinating new angle on one of the 20th century’s great minds. (Dec.)