Internationally renowned as one of the twentieth century's foremost public intellectuals, Hannah Arendt was also intensely private. Though she often acknowledged that the language of poetry--especially that of Dickinson, Goethe, and Lowell--informed her work, only a few people knew that Arendt herself wrote poems.
In fact, between 1923 and 1961, Arendt wrote seventy-four poems, many of them signposts in an otherwise unwritten autobiography...