Poetry After the Holocaust

Abstract

collective killing known as the Holocaust, and the art of poetry. As I am neither a poet nor a critic of poetry, I do not intend to comment upon poetry which takes the Holocaust as its subject matter, nor very much upon the fate of poetry since 1945 and the degree to which the Holocaust may be said to have affected it. I want to reflect, rather, upon the Holocaust itself and its perpetrators, in general historical terms, and also from the perspective of that aspect of the human spirit of which poetry can be said to be an instance, namely poesis. Poesis is the language-making of the inner life. Its domain is not the instrumental depiction of objects, but the expressivity of the subject; thus poesis might be regarded as a form of speech in which inner being finds collective representation. It is the magic of words. Every child is born with the capacity for, and indeed becomes human through, the exercise of poetic speech, but every child does not become a poet. To do so, one must take poetic speech and work with it by incorporating it into a set of canons, of traditions, formal rules, genres, and so forth. Poetry as an art is also a craft, requiring skill and discipline as well as talent. The poet's medium is words, not as representations of things, but as things-in themselves. Not "things" viewed inertly as passive and exterior, but lived moments of being, suffused with memory, anticipation and desire. To say that these words are lived means that they are felt sensuously?through the ear, the eye, the flesh?then concretely expressed to another. Thus the moment of expression is not exterior to poetry. Poetry is not the solopsistic speech of the psychotic, however vivid this may be. It is always addressed to another; and it gathers this other into a community. Poetry, then, is done through the active means of collective speech. Poetry is a praxis for which