"Poetry is a sort of homecoming"
About this Quote
Calling poetry a "homecoming" is Celan’s quiet provocation: the idea of return after catastrophe, when the very notion of home has been shattered. For a poet who survived the Holocaust, lost his parents, and wrote in German, the language of the murderers and also his mother tongue, "home" can’t mean comfort. It means a hard, suspicious retrieval - a coming back that never lands.
The phrase works because it reverses our sentimental reflex. Homecoming usually implies reunion, closure, applause at the station. Celan’s subtext is that poetry is the opposite of closure: a disciplined re-entry into what can’t be resolved. His poems don’t rebuild a stable house; they test whether any shelter is still possible in language. The line hints at a paradox: poetry returns you to origins, yet those origins are contaminated by history, grief, and complicity. To write is to walk back into that minefield anyway.
Context sharpens the claim. Celan’s project, especially after "Todesfuge", is often described as making language answerable to atrocity - stripping lyric beauty of its easy consolations. "Homecoming" becomes an ethical demand: can words still belong to someone who has been exiled from meaning itself? The intent isn’t nostalgia; it’s insistence. Poetry is the only return route he trusts, not to a place that still exists, but to the possibility of address - of speaking to someone, somewhere, after the world has learned how to erase people.
The phrase works because it reverses our sentimental reflex. Homecoming usually implies reunion, closure, applause at the station. Celan’s subtext is that poetry is the opposite of closure: a disciplined re-entry into what can’t be resolved. His poems don’t rebuild a stable house; they test whether any shelter is still possible in language. The line hints at a paradox: poetry returns you to origins, yet those origins are contaminated by history, grief, and complicity. To write is to walk back into that minefield anyway.
Context sharpens the claim. Celan’s project, especially after "Todesfuge", is often described as making language answerable to atrocity - stripping lyric beauty of its easy consolations. "Homecoming" becomes an ethical demand: can words still belong to someone who has been exiled from meaning itself? The intent isn’t nostalgia; it’s insistence. Poetry is the only return route he trusts, not to a place that still exists, but to the possibility of address - of speaking to someone, somewhere, after the world has learned how to erase people.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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