I came to appreciate how much emphasis Celan placed on the essential dialogue that could be heard in all real poetry, and so when Mr. Felstiner quoted Celan's Bremen Prize speech, a talk I was unaware of, I clearly heard the voice of Heidegger. This is not to say that Heidegger told Celan what poetry was about. (I am certain Celan could have told Heidegger just as well.) It is rather that both understood that poetic language is essentially dialectical.

Heidegger had been a Nazi in 1933 and 1934 and then had settled for an ambivalent relationship to his own past which lasted until his death in the 1970's. One would therefore think that Celan might have kept his distance from the man if not from his thinking, but the thinking drew Celan to the man. So he finally visited the philosopher at his cottage in the Black Forest, sometime at the end of the 1950's.

¶ 4:24 PM