Abstract

This article seeks to ask the question of Leonard Cohen as a poet in terms of what Heidegger calls destitute or desperate times (dürftigerZeit) in his WozuDichter (“What Are Poets For”)? This question requires reflection on voice and attunement, including music and eros along with nothing less Heideggerian than the thought of death, reading Leonard Cohen on what appears to be a relation to the religious—for us? for him? for the Christ? ”forsaken, almost human”—but also painfully reflexive: ”we kill the flame”; a poet in dark times as we face them, together and alone.

Highlights

  • Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations

  • This essay raises the question of Leonard Cohen as a poet in ‘dark times’

  • At the same time, just to the extent that I draw the phrase from Martin Heidegger’s “What Are Poets For?” as he begins a lecture initially given on the 20th anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s death, it is important to underscore that the phrase is borrowed from another poet who will be given pride of place, as Heidegger tells us with his very first line: “ ‘... and what are poets for in a destitute time?’ asks Hölderlin’s elegy ‘Bread and Wine’” (Heidegger 1971, p. 91)

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Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. As I speak of his style, Heidegger’s language is at times explicitly musical, given the “way in which” assertions and claims, including his own, are advanced: “‘Way’ here”, meaning, as Heidegger writes, “melody, the ring and tone, which is not just a matter of how the saying sounds”.

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