The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan - Hardcover

Steiner, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811219453 ISBN 13: 9780811219457

Publisher: New Directions, 2012

Synopsis

From the distinguished polymath George Steiner comes a profound and illuminating vision of the inseparability of Western philosophy and its living language.

With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail to bracing illustration, Steiner spans the entire history of philosophy in the West as it entwines with literature, finding that, as Sartre stated, in all philosophy there is “a hidden literary prose.”

“The poetic genius of abstract thought,” Steiner believes, “is lit, is made audible. Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. What voices the closing movements of Hegel’s Phenomenology better than Edith Piaf’s non de non, a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized? This essay is an attempt to listen more closely.”

About this title

About the Author:

Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University and the author of dozens of books (The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Martin Heidegger, In Bluebeard’s Castle), George Steiner is one of the world’s foremost intellectuals.

Review:

“The Poetry of Thought is denser in its language, more disquieting in its arguments, more in line with Steiner’s stronger works, such as Heidegger (1978) and many of the essays collected in No Passion Spent (1996). Steiner’s overall subject here is the interlocked nature of poetic language and philosophical thought, and how the intellect manifests itself through this connection.”
- Rain Taxi

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0811219453
• ISBN 13: 9780811219457
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 223