I Bury the Dead: Poe, Heidegger, and Morbid Literature

Abstract

This essay investigates the way in which dying and dead bodies resist poetic incorporation and the way in which such bodies can be fugitively attested to through fictive prose. It examines Heidegger's treatment of dead and dying bodies from Being and Time to his later work on poetry and language, and it offers as a counterpoint another mode of addressing these bodies found in the fiction of Poe. It also shows how even the poetry of Trakl, heralded by Heidegger as an exemplar of poetic address, can be fruitfully understood in prosaic terms, terms which more faithfully reveal both the content of his poetry itself as well as the true nature of the wounds of dying life.