A new book by George Steiner is always an event.

The New York Times

From one of the world’s foremost thinkers, a vision of the inseparable nature of Western philosophy and its living language.

The Poetry of Thought

Literature by George Steiner

With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner offers The Poetry of Thought as his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture that argues on behalf of the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail to bracing illustration, Steiner spans the entire history of philosophy in the West as it entwines with literature, finding that, as Sartre stated, in all philosophy there is “a hidden literary prose.”

“The poetic genius of abstract thought,” Steiner believes, “is lit, is made audible. Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. What voices the closing movements of Hegel’s Phenomenology better than Edith Piaf’s non de non, a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized? This essay is an attempt to listen more closely.”

Clothbound(published Nov, 22 2011)

ISBN
9780811219457
Price US
24.95
Page Count
192

Ebook(published Nov, 22 2011)

ISBN
9780811219549
Price US
24.95
Page Count
192
Portrait of George Steiner

George Steiner

Contemporary critic and essayist

A new book by George Steiner is always an event.

The New York Times

A unique, powerful, and necessary voice.

The San Francisco Chronicle

The Poetry of Thought is denser in its language, more disquieting in its arguments, more in line with Steiner’s stronger works, such as Heidegger and many of the essays collected in No Passion Spent Steiner’s overall subject here is the interlocked nature of poetic language and philosophical thought, and how the intellect manifests itself through this connection.

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