My chapter explores the relationship – both personal and philosophical – between Heidegger and Paul Celan, a relationship that is defined in all its various senses in terms of silence, denial, evasion, and responsibility. Against a consideration of the intimate ties between philosophy and poetry, I look at two different but related themes. In the first half of my chapter I offer a biographical/historical account of Heidegger’s and Celan’s interactions in postwar Germany during the 1950s and 60s. I then perform a close reading of one of Celan’s notoriously difficult poems – “Die Schliere”/“Streaks” – that serves as a kind of dialogue with Heidegger and as an intimate conversation with him about the topics of postwar silence, evasion, and blindness.

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.