What remains The collected poems of Hannah Arendt

After moving to the U.S. in 1941, philosopher and historian Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism) joined a circle of poets including Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, but her own poems "remained part of her private life" until after her death in 1975. "It is unknown whether she ever tried to publish them," translator Hill remarks in the introduction to this illuminating collection. Arendt's work on totalitarianism and her direct experience of escaping Europe are reflected in her poems, which are also in direct, at times allusive conversation with the German poets she treasured, including Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke. Their strength lies in their tenderness and self-exposure, including in some entries believed to be about her romance with Martin Heidegger: "Oh, you knew the smile with which I gave myself to you./ You knew how much I had to keep secret,/ Just to lie in the meadows and be with you." Fracture, dislocation, and exile are themes: "I stand in no country,/ I am neither here nor there." An elegiac tone also pervades: "But how does one live with the dead? Say,/ where is the sound of their company." These unsparing, literate, and surprisingly candid poems offer a fascinating new angle on one of the 20th century's great minds. (Dec.)

Readers well versed in Arendt's influential political philosophy may not know that she also wrote poetry as a private affair. As quoted in editor/translator Hill's introduction, Arendt saw poetry as the art whose "end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it." Hill, whose Arendt biography, Critical Lives: Hannah Arendt, was published in 2021, found Arendt's poems in a Library of Congress archive in 2010 and, working with Grill, has effectively rendered them in transparent English, complete with helpful annotations. About a third of the poems were written in Arendt's youth (1923--26), before she fled Germany in 1933, and the rest in 1942--61; no record of her poetry survives from the intervening years. The early poems are deeply felt but never sentimental, reflecting on love, happiness, pleasure in the world, personal tumult, and, as befits Arendt's later philosophy, a belief in active engagement ("Oh the days, they waste away, like an unplayed game"). Later, she faces the burdens of World War II ("Ghosts drawing circles around me") and adjustment as a refugee in the United States ("wine in a foreign language changes the conversation"), finally realizing, "I'm no longer a stranger." VERDICT Accessible distillations of heart and mind; readers don't have to know Arendt's philosophy (or philosophy generally) to read this work profitably and with pleasure.--Barbara Hoffert