If thinking, in Hannah Arendt’s words, is to take place as a soundless dialogue with oneself (1978, p. 6), who would be the interlocutors that Arendt kept in her own company, and in what language did they speak? Composed between 1923 and 1961, Arendt’s poems assemble the fragments of an itinerant life punctuated by unspoken events and fate’s undue sentences, documenting her voyage in between wars, continents, and languages. Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill render into English for the first time the seventy-one existing poems by Arendt spanning thirty-eight years. Read alongside the rest of Arendt’s corpus, this edition uncovers the poetic canvas of her political thinking while portraying a free spirit working actively across linguistic and stylistic confines. Among these pages, poetry and philosophy cease to be rivals, emblematizing the act of pluralistic thinking that brings Arendt’s political theory to life.

‘What remains? [Was ist geblieben]?’ In her 1964 interview with Günter Gauss, Arendt famously responded to the question by describing one’s mother tongue as essential—the language is that which remains and which she persistently held onto throughout her life (2007, p. 63). Hill and Grill honor Arendt’s attachment to her mother language with the title of the book. Arranging side by side the German and English texts of each poem, they allow curious readers to recollect the rhymes lost and found in translation. While seeking to remain faithful to the original meaning, the two translators include concise annotations that help to ground the poems in literary and historical contexts. What gets revealed is an Arendt in becoming, a thinker who, steeped in the poetic tradition of classicism and romanticism, playfully reinvented the tropes and metaphors in light of her own personal encounters.

In the introduction—a lyrical essay full of memorable facts and insightful observations—Hill depicts Arendt as a poetic thinker for whom life and literature were never counterposed. Anglophone writers including Robert Lowell, W. H. Auden, and Randall Jarrell found themselves in close friendship and literary exchange with Arendt, while fellow émigrés such as Hermann Broch kept alive their common heritage spelled in the verse of Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, and Rilke. Even though Arendt’s poems feature subject matters that are private by nature—which leads Hill to conclude that ‘her poetry is her private life’ (p. xv)—poetry was inseparable from Arendt’s social world. She seemed always to have an audience in mind, as was evident from her self-collection of poems into two small volumes found in the Library of Congress by Hill in 2011.

In what ways does poetry deepen our understanding of political thought? According to Hill’s interpretation, Arendt’s poems evince a distinct mode of thinking—’poetic thinking’ (p. xxi)—that remedies what Arendt herself identified as the flaws of ‘tyrannical thinking’ (2002, p. 45). Whereas tyrannical thinking involves the divorce of thinking from experience, resulting in moral and political apathy characteristic of many philosophers familiar to Arendt in Nazi Germany, poetic thinking ‘allowed her to weave together thinking and experience’ (p. xxi). Compared to other forms of art, the work of poetry ‘remains closest to the thought that inspired it’ (1958, p. 169). It enables poets, and ‘poets alone’, to ‘bear the burden of truth in our world’ (p. xxiii). While Hill’s interpretation seems plausible, I wonder if Arendt herself would insist on the distinctiveness of poetry versus other genres of thinking, including political theory, as a medium for thought and experience. Is it possible to read Arendt’s poems as political theory, rather than its counterpart?

One hint lies in Arendt’s decision not to write poems in English, which kept her at a wakeful distance from the new world that she gradually grew accustomed to. The choice of German as the language of poetry—first intuitive, then deliberate—was a habit turned into a willful act of commemoration. As if trying to compensate for the abrupt departure from her homeland, and to honor the friends who could not make it through the catastrophe of wartime violence, Arendt walked alongside them between these pages, exploring ways to ‘live with the dead [Hermann Broch]’ (pp. 90, 91) and carry forward their [Walter Benjamin’s] voices (pp. 48, 49).

The wounds of happiness

Become stigmas, not scars.

There would be no record,

if your account

had not been imparted—

poetic language

is a place, not a refuge

(pp. 108-109).

Painfully aware of the privilege of escape, Arendt commanded the ‘poetic language [Gedichtes Wort]’ to speak for the speechless, tying in the hopeful joy of survival with the deepening cut of compunction—‘the wound of happiness/become stigmas, not scars’ (pp. 108, 109). For Arendt, poetry is more than a vessel for ‘factual truth’ (p. xxv). It captures light as well as its shadow, recording nostalgia alongside hope.

Notably Arendt’s style grew more self-consciously abstract after she went into exile. Dividing the corpus into poems written before exile (1923–1926) and after (1942–1961), Hill and Grill carefully acknowledge the intervening years of exile that made poetry difficult. Writing in 1942, soon after arriving in the United States, Arendt suspended her earlier, naïve use of poetic language for intimate dialogue, and began to reflect sentimentally on the nature of language itself. ‘Poetic language/is a place [Stätte], not a refuge [Hort]’ (pp. 108, 109, 140, 141). If language can be called home when one’s homeland has been laid to ruins, Arendt alerts us to the risk of unreflective reiteration. What remains—the idioms, tropes, and slogans—besides calling for preservation, also demands renovation. In this sense, to compose variations on the theme of classical and romantic poetry was to prepare the language for new beginnings, where muted voices and invisible experiences no longer need to hide.

In a passage titled ‘Plurality of Language’ [Pluralität der Sprachen], jotted down in her notebook in 1950, Arendt exposed the illusion of unifying human languages into one (2002, p. 42). Violence would be inevitable in the artificial attempt to impose certainty upon the ambiguous, for it is ‘against the human condition [gegen die »condition humaine«]’ (2002, p. 43). Thanks to the bilingual presentation of Arendt’s poetry in this edition, the plurality of language and thought that she so cherished is kept intact. Here poetry represents neither the basic ingredients for philosophy nor an elementary form of political theory to be superseded by discursive claims, but rather embodies the idea of plurality in a way unachievable by other genres. The pages now become a stage (p. xxvi), putting into play the script that later made its way into Arendt’s political treatises.

Bookended by two poems featuring night and dream, Arendt’s poetic corpus traces no simple odyssey. Instead, it is pierced by her sober denial of the tempting comfort of self-reconciliation.‘Blessed is he who has no home; he still sees it in his dreams’ (pp. 60, 61). Estrangement—both forced and chosen— reminded her of the impossibility to fully inhabit the place where one happens to settle and awakened her to the irreducible variety of human experience.

When I consider my hand

—A foreign thing related to me—

I stand in no country,

I am neither here nor there

I am not certain of anything

(pp. 24, 25).

The poetic Arendt was always speaking to someone else, even when the interlocutor was her undecided self. The multiplicity of her inner voice readied her to listen to unfamiliar others and registered an aversion to conformism which flattens individuality. Years before she contended that ‘plurality is the condition of human action’ (1958, p. 8) in The Human Condition, Arendt had rehearsed the idea multiple times among these scattered lines.

Arendt’s poetic voice is private but not quiet, bringing forth a chorus of female diasporic authors who shared her vocabularies and sensibilities. Here and there one encounters a line echoing the phrases and images found in the works of Nelly Sachs (pp. 138, 139), Charlotte Beradt (pp. 80, 81), and Hilde Domin (pp. 8, 9). In the community of female writers, Arendt’s solitude was guarded by many others, and her complaint of loneliness (pp. 96, 97)—even when unpublished—no longer remained in isolation.

Speaking of the connection between politics and poetry, Arendt remarked that it was only upon learning the transience of all human actions that the Greeks began to ‘immortalize’ them through classical poetry (2002, p. 429). What Remains accomplishes more than recording past events. Adding to the complex portrait of a contemporary thinker, the edition further restores the literary landscape that gave rise to the intellectual horizon of Arendt’s generation, drawing the missing link between the age of enlightenment and twentieth-century political thought. For Arendt scholars and researchers of contemporary political theory, the book makes it possible to reexamine the established dichotomy between the public and private, philosophy and poetry, while prompting further inquiries into the politics of language, the task of translators, and the formation of knowledge in exile. A souvenir of what remains, this precious collection also reminds us of what would be missing when philosophical thinking is severed from that which lies beyond.