Monia Ferrando’s archeological reconstruction of Arcadia as a “political paradigm” that retreats from the nomos of force and usurpation has as its fundamental condition poetry and the voice of the poets. Given the tripartite nomoi of Arcadia (as law of the heart, song, and meadows), which exceeds the autonomy of the polis in Athens, poetic voice functions as the mediation for the effective transmission of the mythopoetic figure that would guarantee another relation, a non-productive and authentic with the world. Throughout the book, whenever Ferrando wants to take a distance from the polis as derivative from the polis she goes to the poets and poetry. Consider for instance, this moment (all the translations are mine from the Spanish edition) in the last chapter on the political paradigm of Virgil: “Poetry, then, is called upon, from its own painful present, to venture like a new Orpheus, but as a memore veggente [a memorious seer], into the darkness of the past, to give new form to love without being content with its mere image. To traverse the stratification of human experience that has shaped the world in order to reshape, in turn, a love reduced to a bloodless and deceptive phantom” [1]. The ‘pre-political’ site of Arcadia is in the poetic voice, whose fundamental task is to transform the ideal of triumph and victory to that of erotic enchantment and fascination that refuses the autonomization of the erotic image [2]. 

When reading the totalit of Il Regno Errante it is not all too difficult to discern that the transmission and ambivalent origin of irruption in the tradition – which Ferrando thinks with Overbeck’s urgeschichte  – is only possible through both a poetization of politics, and the substitution of the hēgemon by the poet when thinking about the afterlife of Arcadia in the genesis of the West, in the very passage from Antiquity to the modern epoch. In this way, poetics is not subsumed to political practice, guided by the classical figure of the ‘Dichter als fuhrer’ described by Max Kommerell, but a state of the via contemplativa in its distancing with the world. In a very elucidating moment Ferrando thematizes this as follows: “Eros is not a political practice in which thought is neatly concealed, but a poetics that culminates in the disinterested contemplation of beauty, in pure theoria. Here, poetry will be philosophical, and philosophy, poetic, without any distinction” [3]. But it is also here that poetry is acting as the supreme activity that can retrieve and connect existence in the world, which is the proper to the classical antiquity, which solicits the question: could this still hold for the philosophical predicament of the poem in modernity? Can the poet stand and mediate to the prophecy at the moment of the decline of the logos, positing the dichtung as an operative substitute? It seems to me that this presents with a difficulty about the transmission of the memory of Arcadia. 

In her recent biography of Paul Celan, Anna Arno mentions in passing and without no theoretical pretensions, that the young Jewish poet, still under the influence of his mentor Alfred Sperber, wrote a poem that while taking place in the meadows of Arcadia, there is a loose arrow that hinders and hunts the possibility and and shadow of death. The last verses of the poem titled “The arrow of Artemis” introduce something like an oblique and unfathomable shadow in the landscape of Arcadia, which Arno describes in this way:  

“The ‘born again’ poet dedicated “The arrow of Artemis” to his mentor. Celan rendered the Arcadian landscape, but in the final stanza he expressed his fear: “How should he who, above sky-blue pebbles…not ponder that Artemis’ arrow, still lurks in the forest and in the end will strike him?”. Introducing a sense of peril, the poem struck up a polemic: mythical lands provided no shelter against the shockwaves of historic barbarism. Celan was declaring a new path, unlike what Sperber could have chosen for him”. [4].

While on the surface there is a superficial way of reading this commentary in the manner of the typical proximity-distance of “poetic influence”, I want to read this moment as emblematic and hyperbolic of the condition of the crisis of the age of the poets in modernity where the transmission of the Arcadian bliss is impossible in the wake of historical barbarism, which also shatters the structure of poematicity as it runs through the intricate work of Celan. How do we understand Celan’s ‘new path’ that seems absolutely heterogeneous to the divinization of the musical voice required to disclose the Arcadian myth? Perhaps modern poetry, and modern poets at large, cannot initiate the restitution of Arcadia because it can only recognize the legitimacy of its own autonomy in a pot-mythic world after the fleeing of the gods.

This is what Giorgio Agamben saw as early as in his text on San Juan de la Cruz when discussing poetry to mystical theology:  “Indeed, San Juan’s mystical theology still presupposes the existence of a positive theology and of a Holy Scripture, from which it derives its own legitimacy and guarantee. Modern poetry, instead, does not recognize any other holy scripture but itself. For this reason, modern poetry—insofar as it is its own, sole guarantor—has been fatally led to question its own limits and its own adequacy and to search in its own incessant, ironic sacrificial self-negation for the only valid guarantee of its own authenticity” [5]. And this thesis has also been validated explicitly in his most recent Il corpo della politica (2026), where the Italian philosopher recalls that all the major poetic gestures of Western poetry in the twentieth century – from Pound’s Cantos to Eliot’s The Wasteland, from Mandelstam’s Fourth Prose to Celan’s own destructive poetry of the German language  – only manages to preserve the ruins and fragments of the tradition. The poet can only register those fragments, but he is incapable of building another world in the accumulated site of its ruins. 

In its possibility of bearing witness in language, experience might open up the trace of the voice in the non-place of death as the sole destiny of between beings, as Carchia suggests in his early essay on Celan’s “The Meridian” [6]. But poetry transfigured in this way entails that the figure of Arcadia can only be taken as the possibility that emerges from the event of language at the border of nihilism and madness. As emblems of this poetic experience without revelation, both Hölderlin’s madness and Celan’s suicide are perhaps instances of this ‘seeking’ in the shadow of Arcadia’s disinterested via contemplativa of beauty, where the nocturnal black that casts a shadow into the clear and sunny landscape of the memory of Arcadia. This shadow does not eclipse the myth of Arcadia; far from it; in its theistic passage disclosed by light of the eros daimon, the voice seems to be prolonged and eternal at the very end of the experience of modern poetry.

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Notes 

1. Monica Ferrando. El reino errante: la Arcadia como paradigma político (Adriana Hidalgo, 2024), 638.

2. Ibid., 595. 

3. Ibid., 538. 

4. Anna Arno, Paul Celan: A Life (Harvard Press, 2026), 60-61.

5. Giorgio Agamben. “La notte oscura di Juan de la Cruz”, in Poesie: Juan de la Cruz (Einaudi, 1974), xii.

6. Gianni Carchia. “Il Meridiano di Celan”, Rivista di Estetica, XVIII, May-August 1973, 196.