Forthcoming book: George Steiner’s “Poetry of Thought”

More than two years ago, on George Steiner‘s 80th birthday (April 23, 2009), The Times announced: “He is researching a book about how great philosophy gets itself written, called The Poetry of Thought.”  As we all know, it’s been some time since the prolific Steiner has published a book. However, in just days (November 22, 2011), you’ll be able to purchase your copy of The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan.

The publisher’s blurb goes like this:

From the distinguished polymath George Steiner comes a profound and illuminating vision of the inseparability of Western philosophy and its living language.
With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail to bracing illustration, Steiner spans the entire history of philosophy in the West as it entwines with literature, finding that, as Sartre stated, in all philosophy there is “a hidden literary prose.”

“The poetic genius of abstract thought,” Steiner believes, “is lit, is made audible. Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. What voices the closing movements of Hegel’s Phenomenology better than Edith Piaf’s non de non, a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized? This essay is an attempt to listen more closely.”

And Thomas McGonigle thinks “it no accident that Steiner was now being published by New Directions since that publishing is one of the very few that is still engaged in publishing what is genuinely of interest in terms of literary originality.” McGonigle (whose “only contact with Steiner was in a classroom— too many years ago— at Columbia”) was able to preview at least some of the lines in Steiner’s new book. I haven’t been able to find anyone else who’s been privy to what Steiner writes there. Maybe there’s a hint in what he told The Guardian‘s Christopher Tayler:

“No culture has a pact with eternity,” he says. “The conditions which made possible the giants of the western poetic, aesthetic, philosophic tradition no longer really obtain.” Steiner doesn’t believe “there can be a Hamlet without a ghost, a Missa Solemnis without a missa”, and if you say that the questions addressed by religion are “nonsense or baby talk or trivial, I don’t believe that certain dimensions will be available to you. Particularly today, when the atheist case is being put, if I may say so, with such vulgarity of mind.” Most writing “seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art. Very, very non-risk-taking. Very tight – often admirably, technically….”

I’ve always appreciated what Steiner has written about poetry (and he’s written some himself), and how that’s influenced our thinking generally. In fact, this very morning one of my daughters was telling me how her high school honors English teacher had given the class ways to analyse and to appreciate poetry. Although Steiner’s name had not been dropped, the rubric sounded suspiciously like his brilliant discussion On Difficulty in poetry. What might we find in this new work on ancient thought, and poetry?