Heideggerian Ecopoetics and the Nature Poetry Tradition

Abstract

``Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch'', Martin Heidegger cited Friedrich Hölderlin in a public lecture in 1951, taking the line as a textual reference point for the explication of his own views on dwelling and poetry. In another lecture given in the same year, he asserted: ``Die Sterblichen wohnen, insofern sie die Erde retten.'' Poetically man lives, or dwells, and mortals dwell in that they save the Earth.1 Jonathan Bate has recently drawn together these two enigmatic statements, elucidating them with reference to other related passages from Heidegger's work, in an `ecopoetic' which is summed up at its simplest and boldest in the assertion: ``Poetry is the place where we save the earth'' (Bate 2000: 283). Heidegger is one of several politically conservative German thinkers whose responses to the development of technology and social modernisation in the first half of the twentieth century have been cautiously reexamined for their ecological potential — others include Ludwig Klages, Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger2 — alongside those of their left-wing contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno. But Heidegger, whose thinking turned decisively towards physis and the Earth in the mid 1930s, and who in his later work transferred to poetry the hopes he had once notoriously placed in the regeneration of society by National Socialism, has provided a particularly fruitful philosophical basis for ecocritical theorising and textual analysis, despite the political problems with which he confronts the critic.