When Martin Heidegger famously rose in 1946 to pay tribute to Rainer Maria Rilke on the twentieth anniversary of the poet’s death, it was hardly by accident that he framed his interpretation of Rilke’s work by quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s now canonical question (‘Wherefore poets…’) regarding the task of poetry in the time called the present, lines that also enabled Heidegger to voice his own distress at the state in which postwar Germany found itself and, more obliquely, the extent of his own involvement in the events of the previous decade and a half. During these postwar years, there were arguably few more attentive or perceptive readers of Heidegger’s writings on poetry than the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot, whose own opposition to National Socialism was from the outset forceful and unyielding. This chapter examines Blanchot’s borrowings from Heidegger (as deployed in Blanchot’s account of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé), his rigorous and probing criticisms of Heidegger’s thinking, and contrasts with that of Heidegger Blanchot’s own significantly divergent interpretation of the work of Hölderlin and Rilke.

Chapter 1 starts from conversation’s intimate verbal connection with verse. Conversation – a mode of social care for Victorians – inscribes not only persons but also other beings and things in figures turning together, creating a verbal way of keeping company with others that many nineteenth-century poets explored through the virtual medium of verse. Lyric written with conversation in mind is sociable, as Empson and Adorno both claimed. To create conversation in modern verse requires eliciting voice from text: both figuring voice and configuring it by prosodic means, in David Nowell Smith’s useful account, encouraging an experience of reading that expands the sense of a single, individual voice to accommodate unlike others. Conversing in verse is a way of redesigning social space, at least in a poem. The chapter turns, in its final third, to the considerable body of twentieth-century philosophical writing addressing the ethical and political importance of conversation, especially the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot as they respond to the poetry of Paul Celan.