Poetry and the Question of Modernity

Interest in Martin Heidegger was recently reawakened by the revelations, in his newly published ‘Black Notebooks’, of the full terrible extent of his political commitments in the 1930s and 1940s. The revelations reminded us of the dark allegiances co-existing with one of the profoundest and most important philosophical projects of the twentieth century—one that is of incomparable importance for literature and especially for poetry, which Heidegger saw as embodying a receptiveness to Being and a