Table of Contents

Introduction

Poetry, philosophy, and modernity: Germany and beyond

Chapter One

Clearings: Finitude, historicity, and the space of poetry

Chapter Two

Straitenings: Paul Celan and world disclosure

Chapter Three

Lightenings: The shades of redress

Chapter Four

Earthings: Enlightenment, religion, and the poem of modernity

About the Author

Ian Cooper is Lecturer in German at the University of Kent. He has published widely on German and English literature and on German philosophy. He wrote The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot (Legenda, 2008). He was co-editor of Aesthetics and Literature in Cambridge University Press’s multi-volume The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought (2013), and of Literature and Religion in the German-Speaking World: From 1200 to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Reviews

"Cooper’s argumentation overlaps and doubles back in a complex, almost vertiginous manner and contains much more than can be touched on here…anyone interested in the ramifications…for reading poems in a philosophical and theological context will want to study and quarrel with Ian Cooper’s rich, dense, forceful book."Charlie Louth, The Times Literary Supplement

'A landmark achievement [...] Ian Cooper [...], with Poetry and the Question of Modernity, has established himself as one of the most inspiring scholars on poetology as a crucial constituent of modernism'.

Rüdiger Görner, Queen Mary University of London, Modern Language Review