WHAT REMAINS

Internationally renowned as one of the twentieth centurys foremost public intellectuals, Hannah Arendt was also intensely private. Though she often acknowledged that the language of poetryespecially that of Dickinson, Goethe and Lowellinformed her work, only a few people knew that Arendt herself wrote poems. In fact, between 1923 and 1961, Arendt wrote seventy-four poems, many of them signposts in an otherwise unwritten autobiography.