"At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary."
Martin Heidegger
Poet and critic Adam Kirsch discusses the metaphysics of modern poetry in an essay titled The Taste of Silence. A quote:
...Heidegger, more than any other philosopher, looked to poetry as a model of what thinking should be. He used individual poems, especially the hymns of Hölderlin, to help explicate his own ideas about nature, technology, art, and history. He constantly dwelled on the mysteries of language and translation, how the way we name things can reveal and conceal their essence. And he himself approached writing in a poetic spirit. We usually think of philosophy, especially German philosophy, as being written in dry, awkward jargon. But Heidegger's writing, though difficult, is deeply creative: he uses nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns, puns on etymologies, and even plays with spelling, all in an effort to jar the reader out of conventional ways of reading and thinking.
All this makes it natural that writers and theorists of language look to Heidegger. But in "The Origin of the Work of Art," he issues a particular invitation to poets, arguing that poetry is in some way the model for all other art forms, and the exemplary activity of human beings. The poet, he writes, "uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word." Like Emerson, that is, Heidegger regards poetry as the truest form of language, and most language as merely defective poetry. "The nature of poetry," he goes so far as to declare, "is the founding of truth."
Read the whole thing in Poetry
