If literature can accurately be said to capture and embody knowledge, it follows that it embodies "truth" or objective reality. The capacity of poetry to capture reality, in the highest sense, has in our day been most forcefully asserted by Martin Heidegger. His aesthetics, which amounts to a theory of poetry, is of the greatest importance as an effort to argue the fulness of poetry. The argument is a dominant concern of his recent thought, and shows how much its author had profited from the e...

Martin Heidegger's philosophical thought has been a guiding presence on the European continent for half a century, having influenced virtually every area of the human sciences from psychology to art in what must be called a revolutionary way. And, yet, a meaningful understanding of the enormous importance of his thinking, especially of his unmethodical methodological impulse, which informs the more immediately appealing "existential analytic" in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) and ...

The influence, direct and indirect, of ["Being and Time" ("Sein und Zeit")], not only in philosophy but literature and psychology, has reached a point where its admirers characterize it as a work that has changed the intellectual map of the modern world. To this some of Heidegger's detractors agree, but add that he has changed the map of the world by overturning a bottle of ink on it. Numerous interpreters have tried to make sense of the blots produced, projecting naturall...

[Literary] influences were not absent from Heidegger's early work. But it is only in the mid-1930s, under stress of public events and in the conviction that the language of Sein und Zeit had proved inadequate to its innovative, revolutionary purpose, that Heidegger turned fully to Hölderlin. The four readings of Hölderlin that Heidegger gave in the guise of lectures and essays between 1936 and 1944 make up one of the most disconcerting, spellbinding documents in the history of Western l...

Thinking about poetry is not the same as poetic thought, but such "thinking about" would certainly busy itself in a void if it cut itself loose entirely from its subject matter's imaginative intellection; and it is the alpha and omega of Heidegger's philosophy that poetry is thought, just as true thought—that is, thought concerned with the meaning of Being—partakes of the essence of poetry. Yes, the alpha too, although it is only in his writings after Being and Time...