Poetic measures of architecture: Martin Heidegger’s ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’

Martin Heidegger begins his lecture ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ by denying poetry is a marginal practice whose imaginings are ‘mere fancies and illusions’. ‘[T]he poetic’, he states, is not ‘merely an ornament and bonus added on to dwelling’. On the contrary, Heidegger boldly claims that poetry is the source of all human dwelling on earth: ‘[…] poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.’

The connective tissue of Heidegger's argument in ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ is the concept of ‘measure’. In the English translation of the lecture, permutations of the term ‘measure’ (Maß/messen) appear a remarkable ninety-four times, not including dozens more uses of its synonyms: ‘dimension’, ‘span’, ‘meter’ and ‘gauge’. What seems surprising, given that the set-up of the lecture revolves around poetry and measure, is that the commonest understanding of measure related to poetry – poetic measure itself – is not discussed thematically by Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger's incessant word play produces meanings that include ‘measuring against’ in the sense of comparing to a standard, ‘measuring up’ a space by ‘stepping-out’ (durchmessen), ‘measuring out’ in the sense of dividing-up or apportioning (das Zu-Gemessene), ‘being measured’ in the sense of having propriety, ‘taking measures’ (die Maß-Nahme) in response to a situation, and ‘measuring between’ as a distance or span. These meanings are of course related to common poetic measure, and might even be claimed to be its ground.