Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present by Ian Cooper (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present by Ian Cooper Rüdiger Cörner Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present. By Ian Cooper. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 2020. 235 pp. £104. ISBN 978–0–367–89427–6. In poetry of all times, and in literary modernism in particular, language and the word as such find themselves exposed in their essence. Therefore, poetry remains [End Page 633] an indispensable indicator of how language is rated both in aesthetic and in social terms. With Ian Cooper's latest monograph, Poetry and the Question of Modernity, which is nothing short of a landmark achievement in contemporary poetology, we can trace the roots of this perception of poetry, namely in what I would call Heidegger's existential verbalism. In it, and through it, the word attained a particular defining status of what Being constitutes in poetical contexts. The (modern) poet regards Being always as an act of Saying, while the philosopher considers verbal emanations of Being as surrogates of pure' existence. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why modern philosophers are, by and large, poor poets, Heidegger very much included, and why poets are often more than respectable thinkers. Cooper's investigation into the nature of poetic Being as part of Heidegger's philosophical presence in Paul Celan and, more surprisingly, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, as well as David Jones, complements his first monograph, The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot (London: Routledge, 2008). This is mainly evident in the last chapter of his new study, which is devoted to 'Poetry, Religion, and the Overcoming of Enlightenment', where he can also draw on his expertise as co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought' (2013). But Cooper is right not to employ the overused concept of 'reception' in this context, for he is primarily interested in the workings of Heideggerian thought in contemporary poetry. Arguably, Cooper might have used the word 'analogy' more often when discussing Heideggerian traces, particularly in the works of Heaney and David Jones given their usage of language, which can be regarded, in places, as analogous to Heidegger's conception of language and Being. This is particularly important given the absence of an actual engagement of these poets with Heidegger's texts. Admittedly, there were poets who even wrote on Heidegger but did not allow his approach to thought to impregnate their poetry. The most famous case in mind is Ingeborg Bachmann, who is curiously absent in Cooper's study. It would have been of genuine interest, given his supreme insight into the 'mechanisms' of Heidegger's poetology of thought, most prominently expressed in his reflections on Hölderlin, to compare, say, Celan's various takes on Heidegger with Bachmann's strikingly formalistic approach to his conception of Being through poetry. As comprehensive as Cooper's discussion on the poets in question and their Heideggerian leanings is, his contextualization of their engagement with this thinker could have been slightly more encompassing. For instance, why not refer to Botho Strauß or indeed Peter Handke in this connection? Reference to the infamous 'Black Notebooks' by Heidegger seems of use only if a clear case can be made between them and the significance of this philosopher's contribution to modern, if not contemporary, poetology. To be sure, Cooper's concern is with Heidegger's 'destiny of Being' (p. 8), expressed in the 'alienation from Being' through modernity and technology. In this, poetry acquires an operational status. Cooper helpfully and early on in his study defines modern poetry as 'poetry which not only unfolds or implies a particular view of modern experience, but whose mode of creating a linguistic world either [End Page 634] originated immediately within or, like Heidegger's thought, derives from that foundational period in the 1790s of which [Charles] Taylor spoke: when "the subject", and the desire to go back beyond it, arose' (p. 8). As this quotation demonstrates, Cooper's scholarly prose is not for the syntactically faint-hearted reader, but this is not meant...