of being. However, it is not merely an expedient that our attempt to prepare for a thinking experience with language seeks out the neighborhood of poetry; for the attempt rests upon the supposition that poetry and thinking belong within one neighborhood. Perhaps this supposition corresponds to the imposition which we hear only vaguely so far: the being of language—the language of being.

In order to uncover a possibility of undergoing a thinking experience with language, let us seek out the neighborhood in which poetry and thinking dwell. A strange beginning—we have so little experience with either. And yet we know them both. A great many things are known to us about poetry and thinking under the rubrics Poetry and Philosophy. Nor are we trying to find our way blindly into the neighborhood of poetry and thinking: a poem "The Word" is already echoing in our ear, and thus we have our eyes on a poetic experience with language. With all due reservations we may sum it up in the saying of the renunciation: "Where word breaks off no thing may he." As soon as we consider that what is named here is the relation between thing and word, and with it the relation of language to an entity as such, we have called poetry over into the neighborliness of thinking. Thinking, however, sees nothing strange in that. In fact, the relation between thing and word is among the earliest matters to which Western thinking gives voice and word, and does so in the form of the relation between being and saying. This relation assaults thinking in such an overpowering manner that it announces itself in a single word. The word is logos. It speaks simultaneously as the name for Being and for Saying.

More overpowering still for us is the fact that here no thinking experience with language is being made, in the sense that language itself, as such, comes to word explicitly and according to that relation. From this observation we conclude: Stefan George's poetic experience means something age-old, something that has struck thinking long ago and ever since has held it captive, though in a manner that has become both commonplace and indiscernible to us. Neither poetic experience