Arendt on Poetry.2

I apologize for my obsession with Arendt and poetry. I'm working on a paper on Arendt and women, which is, of course, interesting, but not as interesting as Arendt (and anyone else) on poetry.

Arendt writes about poetry in the midst of her discussion of work, which she distinguishes from labor (which deals with the necessities of life and occurs/should occur in the private sphere) and action (which occurs when men/women interact directly with each other):

"Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it. The durability of a poem is produced through condensation, so that it is as though language spoken in utmost density and concentration were poetic itself. Here, remembrance, Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, is directly transformed into memory, and the poet's means to achieve the transformation is rhythm, through which the poem becomes fixed in the recollection almost by itself. It is this closeness to living recollection that enables the poem to remain, to retain its durability, outside the printed or the written page, and though the 'quality' of a poem may be subject to a variety of standards, its 'memorability' will inevitably determine its durability, that is, its chance to be permanently fixed in the recollection of humanity. Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually by 'made,' that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves."

--The Human Condition, 169-170