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THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE

an assertion, we could set out to prove its truth or falseness. That would be easier by far than to endure the imposition or make our peace with it.

The being of language—the language of being. The demand that we experience this sentence thoughtfully would seem to stem from the lecture imposing it on us. But the imposition comes from another source. The transformation of the title is of such a kind that it makes the title disappear. What follows then is not a dissertation on language under a different heading. What follows is the attempt to take our first step into the country which holds possibilities of a thinking experience with language in readiness for us. In that country, thinking encounters its neighborhood with poetry. We heard of a poetic experience with the word. It is concentrated in the language of the poem's lost stanza:

            So I renounced and sadly see:
            Where word breaks off no thing may be.
    

Through a brief commentary on the two preceding triads, we tried to gain an insight into the poetic way of this experience. Just a look from afar at the poet's way—surely we are not conceited enough to imagine that we have gone this way ourselves. For George's poetic saying, in this poem and in the others that belong with it, is a going that is like a going away, after the poet had formerly spoken like a lawgiver and a herald. Thus this poem "The Word" rightly has its place in the last part of the last volume of poetry George published, Das Neue Reich, published in 1928. This last part is entitled "The Song." The song is sung, not after it has come to be, but rather: in the singing the song begins to be a song. The song's poet is the singer. Poetry is song. Hölderlin, following the example of the ancients, likes to call poetry "song."

In his recently discovered hymn "Celebration of Peace," Hölderlin sings, at the beginning of the eighth stanza:


Martin Heidegger (GA 12) On the Way to Language