Speeches on Poetry

SPEECH IN THE FREE HANSEATIC CITY OF BREMEN,1958

SPEECH ON BEING AWARDED THE GEORG BÜCHNER PRIZE 1960

PROSE POEM CONVERSATION IN THE MOUNTAINS, 1959, published 1960

The aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the relations between philosophical, poetical, and ordinary language. As for ‘ordinary’ language and its relation to the poetical, I draw upon Paul Celan’s ‘The Meridian’—a formal speech on what poetry is, what it might achieve, and why it may seem ‘obscure’. Paul Celan’s speech on poetry involves striking departures—in his speech and in the poems that he cites—departures from the syntax of ordinary language—departures that convey or create extraordinary effects with (for the most part) ordinary words [1] (pp. 401–403). The other approach of these investigations into ‘ordinary’, ‘poetological’, and philosophical thought is determined by David Macarthur’s interest in Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophie dürtfe man eigentlich nur dichten’, for which this editor of this collection of papers finds, as most apt, Marjorie Perloff’s translation: ‘Philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetry’. In these terms, we may see Celan himself as working towards Wittgenstein’s ideal—to create philosophy poetically’. Furthermore, since Wittgenstein’s belief that philosophy should not be restricted to writing it, we can regard David Antin’s phrase, ‘One should really only do philosophy as poetry’, as a further refinement of this concept. Finally, since Wittgenstein’s desire is not that, in doing philosophy, one should produce a poem, we could say that, when doing philosophy, he wants to weigh his words, phrases, apostrophes, and sentences poetologically.

Celan’s iterated ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ is a summons to surpass the ‘ordinary’ expectations of public speech—to face the challenge of ever more intense and fine-grained thought. It is in these terms that Celan introduces, dramatically, the conflict in our ideas about art—whether poetry is one of the arts, or whether its role is to shatter the stereotypes—and archetypes—of every mode of art. To describe further how Celan deals in ‘The Meridian’ with this question, we shall take his lead and give a prime place to what he relays from Georg Büchner’s Lenz.

Having now distilled such meaning, we may observe that, in his speech on poetry, in a paper titled ‘The Meridian’, Celan departs ever more dramatically from the use of ordinary language. Still, at the same time, he moves towards Wittgenstein’s ideal of doing philosophy. He creates a speech with a poetological quality, which, as a critique and explanation of this poetology, is now philosophical in character and direction. So, we can read Celan’s work as navigating what is virtually a reversal of Wittgenstein’s desire to move philosophy towards the poetical. In his use of the trope of meridian lines between the poles, he enables us to see how the poetic impulse may unfold towards the philosophical.

In terms of the classical ‘quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry, Celan’s actions are designed to avoid the pre-eminence of the poetic mode or of the philosophical. Neither are we encouraged to engineer a departure of both philosophy and poetry from the whole classical trope of dispute. And, for us then, in perceiving the issue in terms of Wittgenstein’s ideal, what we may gain is the control needed to loosen the grip on thought that the classical antithesis still maintains. For Plato’s Socrates, philosophy fears the beauty of poetry in its power to move us by its own kind of ‘argument’. In combatting such a power, Plato’s Socratic philosophy alleges that poetry only leaps to its conclusions; it makes a detour around the ‘Men at Work’ whose labour of critical enquiry and logical challenge allows us to arrive safely to our conclusions. Poetry’s role in this dispute would then to be cast as pre-eminent in sounding the depths and netting the fish of experience.1

In this context, I have chosen as my primary point of reference the public speeches delivered by Paul Celan on the nature and need for poetry—poetry that the publisher’s well-known, ‘educated reader’ may find ‘obscure’—allusive in its references and elusive in its kind of narrative. I am also interested in the shorter speech that Celan delivered upon being awarded the Literature Prize from the ‘Free Hanseatic City of Bremen’. As it proceeds, we find that this pair of speeches2 amounts to work upon and within the art of poetry and of philosophy. His artfully expressed ideas about these related experiments with language connect, then, with Wittgenstein’s ideal, in our philosophical pursuits, of employing modes of speech that define poetry.

It was vital for Celan that, in exhibiting how poems and poetic prose are used to express common concerns and ordinary language, in his speeches, he should draw upon the advancements in dealing with these themes—advances made by the narrative, Lenz and the play, The Death of Danton—by Georg Büchner, 19th C avant-garde writer of plays and short fictions. Here, there is a rapid movement from his address to the dignities within a formal code to explaining, affectively, how he can write poetry (non-barbarically!)—in fact, he must do so. Celan writes about the possibility of creating poetry—or any of the arts—after ‘that which happened’ to the Jews of Europe. In explaining poetry and citing significant sections of some poems, he must make us think again of that difficult utterance of Adorno’s on the ‘barbarity’ (later, Adorno speaks of ‘impossibility’) in writing poetry after Auschwitz3 [5]. In relation to what Celan offers us in his speech, I am sometimes an expositor, adopting his directions and speaking in pursuit of his chosen ‘meridian’ line. At other times, I look in a direction that glances away from this line. In any case, the work of this co-operation has the aim of escaping the stasis of the age-long embattled stand-off between a philosophical and a poetological sensibility.

In the boldness of his many-times iterated address, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’, Paul Celan shows his determination to speak and to be heard by people perhaps more bent upon preserving past literary glory than wrestling with a new, baffling, contemporaneity. To us still he calls—addressing us with the question of what we may expect of poetry—or philosophy. The vital distinction may be the one we can make between poetry or philosophy as critique, on the one hand, and philosophy or poetry as display, on the other. Whether we work within poetry or philosophy, equally, we practice a critique of concepts and we work to display what is the case. At each stage, we see anew what has not been seen; we say what has not been said.

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In Bremen, within the space of only a couple of pages, Celan raises key issues about the nature of poetry as he finds it and as he practises it—in particular, in relation to the question of a ‘loss’ of language in the period that was not only that of the mass murder of the Jews in Europe, but the systematic co-option and distortion of the German language and Yiddish idiom. In speaking to this Hanseatic League, Celan recalls it as a centre and force for political and economic liberality. It ‘comprised merchants widely renowned for their access to a variety of commodities’; it was an organisation that, in the 12th C, ‘encompassed nearly 2000 settlements’ in Europe. Historically, it spread across what are now seven countries. ‘At its zenith’, Celan remarks, ‘it appeared within a loosely aligned confederation of city states’. Towards the end of the 17th C, it began to unravel, but the historical legacy of the League was such that the Senat of Lübeck did not permit Hitler to speak there during his 1932 election campaign. In fact, that ‘Hanseatic League’ is now seen as a precursor to the European Union. Celan refers to the strength of the tradition of publishing in Bremen as, historically, a ‘free Hanseatic city’. It is in the context of how the German language was distorted during the Nazi period that Celan refers to the strength of Bremen in sustaining a culture of liberationist publication. Members of Celan’s audience for this speech would have known what he was referring to—particularly in relation to the language used to describe Jews, and the ‘murderous restrictions’ placed upon Jews in their use of the German language:

[But it] had to pass through frightful muting… the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again—‘enriched’ by ‘all this’ [1] (p. 395).

This ‘language’, then, ‘remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything’. One can read these brief and searing remarks as one more of Celan’s responses to the feeling that was expressed so dramatically by Theodor Adorno—that ‘after Auschwitz it was barbaric to write poetry’. So, Celan makes a declaration about his use of this [German] language:

I have sought, during those years and in the years since then, to write poems to orient myself and to sketch out reality for myself. It was event, movement, a being underway, and attempt to find direction—a movement that involves the question of the clock-hand’s direction. For a poem is not timeless … it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time [1] (pp. 395–396).

‘Towards what does this movement bear us’ Celan asks, in the sudden intensification of language that bespeaks poetry itself. The answer he provides is contained within the project that he declares as his own, of moving ‘towards something standing open … perhaps to an addressable Thou, towards an addressable reality … [which is] what is at stake in a poem’. Celan would write ‘towards infinity’, though the origins are found in real and specific times. He shares and continues the historical ‘Hanseatic’ bent towards publication—characteristic of the city of Bremen. Celan recognises other lyric poets—those of a younger generation whose efforts are ‘over arced by stars that are human handiwork’. They are the efforts of a poet who, ‘shelter-less in this till now undreamt-of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being to language, stricken by, and seeking, reality’ [1] (p. 396).