David Nowell Smith’s Sounding/Silence explores Martin Heidegger’s engagement with poetry, combining philosophical inquiry, poetic form, and the very limits of intelligibility. Far from being a mere commentary on Heidegger’s forays into poetry, this work interrogates the essential tensions and convergences between Heidegger’s thought and the domain of poetics, revealing the ways in which Heidegger’s readings of poets such as Hölderlin and Trakl not only reimagine the parameters of poetry but also extend the contours of philosophical reflection itself.
Heidegger’s often disdainful posture toward traditional poetics and literary criticism forms the paradoxical backdrop against which Nowell Smith situates his argument. Heidegger insisted that his analyses of poetry, or Erläuterungen, were not contributions to aesthetics or literary history but rather arose from a necessity intrinsic to thought. And yet the themes Heidegger grapples with—prosody, trope, rhythm, poetic language, and the “truth” of poetry—are central to the very field Heidegger seemed to eschew. Through this tension, Nowell Smith foregrounds how Heidegger’s ostensibly idiosyncratic readings offer a fertile ground for rethinking the essence and stakes of poetics, not merely as a discipline but as a mode of inquiry into the limits of language and being.
Central to this rethinking is the concept of “openness” (aletheia)—the foundational clearing where beings emerge into intelligibility. Nowell Smith shows how Heidegger sees the work of art, particularly poetry, as a dynamic event that shapes the parameters of this clearing. The poetic work, in its rhythmic and linguistic articulation, becomes a site where the exchanges of presence and absence, earth and world, materiality and disclosure, creates the conditions for a new encounter with beings. This interplay necessitates a recalibration of the traditional notions of form, trope, and measure, as these are no longer merely structural elements but dynamic forces within the ontological event that the artwork enacts.
In this context, Heidegger’s critical gestures are reexamined, such as his dismissal of metaphor and his reconceptualization of rhythm and measure. Far from a simple rejection, Heidegger’s critiques are shown to be a strategic effort to rethink these concepts beyond their metaphysical sedimentation. For instance, Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin’s poetic measure reveals a vision of rhythm not as a formal or prosodic constraint but as the kinetic movement through which the poetic work discloses the openness of being. Similarly, Heidegger’s resistance to metaphor is recast by Nowell Smith as an attempt to move beyond the sensuous-nonsensuous dichotomy that underpins conventional understandings of figurative language, opening instead onto a conception of poetic language as a bodily articulation that resonates with the originary strangeness of being itself.
Nowell Smith’s analysis rethinks the role of the body in Heidegger’s philosophy of language and poetry. The sounding of language, he argues, is not merely a verbal or symbolic act but a bodily and material event that articulates the silent clearing in which beings come to presence. Here, the body is not reduced to its physiological or phenomenological dimensions but is seen as an active participant in the event of language, resonating with the unspoken and unspeakable dimensions of poetic truth. This bodily dimension of language, articulated through the concept of “bodying forth,” situates the poem as a threshold where the boundaries of verbal articulation and silent manifestation are negotiated and transformed.
Through a careful reading of Heidegger’s discussions of Hölderlin and Trakl, as well as a broader engagement with Heidegger’s philosophical corpus, Nowell Smith shows how the “truth” of poetry lies not in its representational or symbolic content but in its capacity to reshape the openness within which beings and worlds are disclosed. Poetry, for Heidegger, is not merely a linguistic artifact but a site of ontological transformation, and Nowell Smith compellingly demonstrates how this vision challenges and enriches contemporary understandings of poetics.
Yet Sounding/Silence is not content to remain within the confines of Heideggerian thought. By critically engaging with Heidegger’s readings, Nowell Smith gestures toward a “poetics of limit” that moves beyond Heidegger’s own idiomatic approach. This poetics does not merely interpret poetic texts but seeks to preserve the transformative force of poetry itself, allowing it to inflect thought in ways that exceed both aesthetic and hermeneutic frameworks. In this way, the book serves not only as a major contribution to Heidegger studies but also as a vital provocation for future explorations of poetics and the philosophy of language.
In its luminous complexity, Sounding/Silence invites its readers to rethink the very boundaries of poetry, philosophy, and thought. Lucidly written and profoundly insightful, it stands as a testament to the enduring relevance of Heidegger’s thought for contemporary debates in poetics and aesthetics, while also opening new pathways for the ongoing dialogue between philosophy and art. Through its meticulous scholarship and its daring speculative reach, this book challenges us to listen anew to the sounding of silence at the limits of language and being.
Simon Gros 
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