Here we get the delightful piece of Krzysztof Ziarek once again considering, indeed, Stevens and Heidegger. Yes, Heidegger was definitively German, but the essay’s large concept, the “foreignness of poetry,” turns out to have only tangential connection to Stevens’s sense of Europe, a limitation that fortunately does not thwart Ziarek’s revisionist reading of an important late poem, “Of Mere Being.” Again, though, “mere being” is an existential condition more fundamental, more culturally unspecific, than can be obtained by the category “European.”

¶ 1:37 PM