What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt

What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt

Translated and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill

Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2025

In today’s fraught political world, twentieth-century political philosopher Hannah Arendt is having a bit of a moment. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), her study of the intellectual underpinnings that allowed both Hitler and Stalin to rise to power, feels newly relevant as we watch demagogues and authoritarians create chaos and threaten tyranny around the globe.

In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt argues that deep involvement in the public sphere must be balanced with contemplative moments of solitude. An active life connected to the events of the world provides experiences requiring private reflection—or “thinking” to use Arendt’s appellation. Reviewing the book for Encounter magazine, the poet W. H. Auden wrote, “Every now and then, I come across a book which gives me the impression of having been especially written for me. In the case of a work of art, the author seems to have created a world for which I have been waiting all my life.” He was so moved by Arendt and her work that later in life, he asked her to marry him—to share not a romantic relationship but an emotional bond, and to care for each other as they grew old. (Arendt declined his offer.)

Although Arendt published only intellectual nonfiction, many serious poets admired her work and flocked around her. She was close friends with Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell. She also spent time with Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, and Elizabeth Bishop among others. These poets recognized the political philosopher as a kindred spirit—sometimes explaining that she had a poet’s soul and that she employed what Arendt herself called “poetic thinking” in her analytical treatise.

As it turns out, Arendt did herself write poetry—just not in her public life. What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt is the first English-language translation of the more than seventy poems the political philosopher wrote, all composed in her first language of German and written between 1923 and 1961. There is no evidence that she ever tried to publish these poems or that even her friends knew about them. “Until Hannah Arendt’s archives were opened by [her close friend] the American novelist Mary McCarthy in 1988,” writes editor Sarah Rose Hill, “her poems remained part of her private life.” Indeed, “her poems were her private life.”

These poems were important to Arendt, enough that she went to extremes to keep them with her throughout her life. When she fled Germany in 1933, she packed her early poems to carry with her to France. She kept them with her during her internment at the Gurs camp in France, during her journey through Europe (some of it on foot), and when she traveled by ship to Ellis Island and started her new life in the United States. As a scholar who had relied on private papers to research her first book-length study, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, Arendt surely knew these poems she carefully protected throughout her life would be discovered after her death.

Arendt’s early poems are plain and direct. “Consolation,” written in early 1920s Germany, includes this verse: “There come days/ When no scale/ Can decide:/ Life or sorrow.” Whether that sorrow is private grief or public crisis, “One victory remains:/ Survival.” As she and her poetry matured, she tried to use more emotion in her writing. In “Lament,” for example, she wrote these lines: “But sorrow will not silence/ Old dreams or young wisdom./ Nor will it make me give up on/ The beautiful pure joy of life.”

By the 1940s, Arendt turned to increasingly political themes in her poetry: “Justice and freedom// Brothers, don’t hesitate/ Dawn rises before us. Justice and freedom/ Brothers, take a risk/ Tomorrow we strike the devil dead.” Much of this later poetry filtered abstract ideas through personal responses. Take, for example, this 1947 poem (composed in dialogue with the 1801 poem “Brot und Wein” by one of Arendt’s favorite German poets, Friedrich Holderlin), which weds the pain of exile and migration with the complication of building a life in a new place:

This was the farewell:

Many friends came with us

and whoever did not come was no longer a friend.

This was the evening:
Haltingly, it slowed our pace,

and drew our souls out the window.

This was the train:

Measuring the country in flight

and slowing as it passed through many cities

This is the arrival:

Bread is no longer called bread

and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

When Samantha Rose Hill stumbled across Arendt’s poems in the archives while researching her dissertation, she recognized how these entries constituted a source that could be used like a historian might use a subject’s diary or journal. By braiding together insights gained from studying the poems with careful readings of the political philosopher’s nonfiction and the more general historical record, Hill constructed the most intimate biography of Hannah Arendt available today, published by UK press Reaktion in 2021.

This new collection of Arendt’s poems is arranged in chronological order with Arendt’s original German and the new English translations, made by Hill with the assistance of Genese Grill, printed on facing pages. Even readers who know no German can see how Arendt uses repetition and rhyme in the originals. Although Arendt’s poetry is often meaningful and sometimes elegant, this volume of her collected poems is not a profound contribution to the field of poetry. Instead, the strongest contribution of What Remains is its bright illumination of Arendt’s overall body of work—her intellectual dissection of authoritarian rule, her sorrow in the face of the fracturing of the society she knew, and her deep love for the world.

Hannah Joyner lives in Washington, D.C. Her books include Unspeakable and From Pity to Pride. You can find her on Booktube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.