What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt

Readers well versed in Arendt’s influential political philosophy may not know that she also wrote poetry as a private affair. As quoted in editor/translator Hill’s introduction, Arendt saw poetry as the art whose “end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.” Hill, whose Arendt biography, Critical Lives: Hannah Arendt, was published in 2021, found Arendt’s poems in a Library of Congress archive in 2010 and, working with Grill, has effectively rendered them in transparent English, complete with helpful annotations. About a third of the poems were written in Arendt’s youth (1923–26), before she fled Germany in 1933, and the rest in 1942–61; no record of her poetry survives from the intervening years. The early poems are deeply felt but never sentimental, reflecting on love, happiness, pleasure in the world, personal tumult, and, as befits Arendt’s later philosophy, a belief in active engagement (“Oh the days, they waste away, like an unplayed game”). Later, she faces the burdens of World War II (“Ghosts drawing circles around me”) and adjustment as a refugee in the United States (“wine in a foreign language changes the conversation”), finally realizing, “I’m no longer a stranger.”