Born: Lauffen am Neckar, Württemberg (now in Germany); March 20, 1770
Died: Tübingen, Württemberg (now in Germany); June 7, 1843
PRINCIPAL POETRY
Nachtgesänge, 1805
Gedichte, 1826 (Poems, 1943)
Selected Poems, 1944
Poems and Fragments, 1966
Selected Poems and Fragments, 1998
Odes and Elegies, 2008
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
The deep love for Greek culture that marked the lyric poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (HURL-dur-leen) also had a profound impact on his other literary endeavors. Aside from his verse, he is most remembered for the epistolary novel Hyperion: Oder, Der Eremit in Griechenland (1797, 1799; Hyperion: Or, The Hermit in Greece, 1965). In the story of a disillusioned Greek freedom fighter, the author captured in rhythmic prose much of his own inner world. The novel is especially notable for its vivid imagery and its power of thought and language. Fascination with the legend of Empedocles’ death on Mount Etna moved him to attempt to re-create the spirit of the surrounding events in the drama Der Tod des Empedokles (pb. 1826; The Death of Empedocles, 1966), which exists in three fragmentary versions. After 1800, he began translations of Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 B.C.E.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715) and AntigonT (441 B.C.E.; Antigone, 1729); his highly successful renderings were published in 1804. Among the various essays on philosophy, aesthetics, and literature written throughout his career, his treatises on the fine arts in ancient Greece, Achilles, Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 B.C.E.; English translation, 1611 ), and the plays of Sophocles are especially significant. Only a small portion of his correspondence has been preserved.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Unlike the great German lyricists with whom he is compared, Friedrich Hölderlin did not attain substantial literary recognition in his own time. This lack of recognition was in part a result of his own misperception of his audience. While he directed his poems to the broad following of the spiritual and intellectual renewal engendered by the French Revolution, his contemporaries, excepting a special few, did not penetrate beyond the surface of his particular revelation of the rebirth of idealism’s golden age.
Friedrich Schiller’s early patronage gave Hölderlin access to influential editors and other promoters of mainstream literature, enabling him to publish in important journals and popular collections of the time. His work appeared in Gotthold Stäudlin’s Schwäbisches Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1792 (1792) and Poetische Blumenlese (1793), as well as Schiller’s Thalia and other periodicals. Neither Schiller nor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, however, fully recognized Hölderlin’s true gifts as a writer. Eventually, they distanced themselves from him, and Hölderlin fell into obscurity.
After his death, Hölderlin remained forgotten until his work was rediscovered by Stefan George and his circle. George acclaimed him as one of the great masters of the age, pointing especially to the uniqueness of his language and the expressiveness of his style. In the modern poets whose works reflect a keen inner struggle with the meaning of existence, he at last found a receptive audience, capable of appreciating his contribution to the evolution of the German lyric. Among those whose writings give strong evidence of his productive influence are Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
For his special mastery of form, his naturalization of classical Greek meters and rhythms in the German language, and his unique ability to clothe prophetic vision in verse, Hölderlin now stands alongside Goethe as one of the great poets of German idealism.
BIOGRAPHY
The untimely deaths of both his father and his stepfather determined the course of Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin’s childhood and youth. His mother, a devoutly religious Lutheran, insisted that he prepare for a career in the clergy. While attending monastery schools at Denkendorf and Maulbronn, he began writing poetry that reflected the suffering of a sensitive spirit under the rigors of traditional discipline and an inability to reconcile the demands of practical reality with his inner sense of artistic calling. Youthful love affairs with Luise Nast (the “Stella” of his early poems) and Elise Lebret exacerbated the tension between the two poles of his existence.
In 1788, Hölderlin entered the theological seminary at the University of Tübingen. Although he completed his studies and received a master’s degree that titled him to ordination, the years spent in Tübingen eased him away from any desire to become a pastor. With his friends Christian Ludwig Neuffer and Rudolf Magenau, he founded a poetry club patterned after the Göttinger Hain. He also joined a secret political organization with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling and openly advocated social reforms inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. The true key to his rejection of a life of service in the church, however, was neither purely artistic inclination nor political commitment but rather deep spiritual conflict within himself. Concentrated exposure to the literature, art, and philosophy of classical antiquity caused him to develop a worldview that placed the ancient Greek gods, as vital natural forces, next to Christ in importance for the dawning of a new, humane era of enlightenment and harmony. The tension between the old pantheon and Christian dogma made it impossible for him to feel comfortable in total dedication to institutionalized religion.
Among his contemporaries, Hölderlin’s most important role model was Schiller, whose poetry had a strong impact on both his early Tübingen hymns and his later classicistic creations. In 1793, Hölderlin met Schiller for the first time. Their friendship remained rather one-sided; Schiller did not reciprocate the warmth and devotion of his awestruck protégé. Through Schiller’s mediation, Hölderlin obtained the first of a long series of positions as a private tutor. These situations, despite their repeated failure, enabled him to avoid the necessity of accepting an appointment as a pastor.
Hölderlin’s most significant assignment as a tutor began in 1795, when he entered the service of a wealthy banker in Frankfurt. A love affair with his employer’s wife, Susette Gontard, provided the stimulus for a newfound sophistication in his poetry. Much of the substance that he treated in verse while in Frankfurt was later refined and presented in more perfect form in the exquisite odes, elegies, and hymns of his late period. Susette herself became the model for Diotima in his novel Hyperion and the poems related to it.
After an unpleasant scene with Susette’s husband in 1798, Hölderlin fled to Homburg, where he remained until 1800 with his friend Isaak von Sinclair. Hölderlin continued to see and correspond secretly with Susette, but he was unsuccessful in establishing himself in a permanently meaningful way of life. An endeavor to edit a new journal and make his living as a freelance writer foundered. Plagued by an increasing inner isolation, he was compelled to return home to his mother.
From an artistic point of view, the years immediately after 1800 were the most important of Hölderlin’s career; emotionally and spiritually, they were years of progressive devastation. New tutorial positions in Switzerland and France collapsed rapidly. In 1802, Hölderlin left Bordeaux and traveled home on foot. He arrived in Nürtingen mentally and emotionally disturbed after learning of Susette’s death. In 1804, temporarily recovered from his nervous breakdown, he returned to Homburg, where Sinclair arranged for him to work as a librarian. When Sinclair was arrested for subversive political activities, Hölderlin’s mental condition deteriorated drastically, and he was placed in a sanatorium. In 1806, he was declared incurably ill and given into the care of a carpenter and his wife. He spent the remainder of his life living in a tower room overlooking the Neckar, where he wrote occasional, strangely simple lyrics, played the flute and the piano, and received visitors.
ANALYSIS
In the final stanza of his famous poem “Die Heimat” (“Homeland”), Friedrich Hölderlin captured the essence of his personal artistic calling and its lyrical product. The pairing of love, the divine fire that stimulates creativity, with suffering, the holy reward that the gods give to their poet-prophet, defines the poles of existential tension that were a primary focus of his life and works. A peculiar mixture of the poetry of experience and that of ideas, his early hymns and his mature odes, elegies, and hymns in free rhythms are at once the offspring of intense adoration—of beauty, nature, Greek antiquity, an idealized world of tomorrow—and profound spiritual pain resulting from recognition of the abyss between the poet and the things that he cherishes. The result is a constant duality of mood: on one hand, deeply elegiac longing for the elements of a lost golden age; on the other, overwhelming joy in the message of love that is the joint legacy of the Greek world and the Christian tradition. Oscillating between hope and despair, anticipation and resignation, tragic darkness and powerfully prophetic vision, his verse documents the continuing struggle of a spirit that needs to belong to society yet remains alone as a priest who serves no church, a singer of a people no longer or not yet there.
Despite the concentrated projection of the deeply personal strivings of his own soul into his writings, Hölderlin’s lyrics were based firmly in an age-old and broadly recognized tradition to which he gave new life. At the same time, they represent a mating of impulses from the German classical and Romantic movements that dominated the literary mainstream of his own time. His interpretation of models ranging from Plato to Spinoza, from Homer and Hesiod to Schiller and Goethe, and including Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, and Ludwig Christoph Hölty generated a multisided literature that mixes a glowing sense of freedom with enthusiastic, unfettered pantheism and celebration of the highest human ideals with Weltschmerz.
INFLUENCE OF SCHILLER AND KLOPSTOCK
The influence of Schiller upon Hölderlin’s early creations is especially noticeable. Scholars often point to the melancholy longing for the beauty and glory of Greece, the lost spiritual homeland, as a defining characteristic of Hölderlin’s early verse. His various elaborations of this theme, particularly his emphatic presentations of the ancient gods as living elemental forces, give remarkable evidence of having been motivated directly by Schiller’s well-known poem “Die Götter Griechenlands” (“The Gods of Greece”). Moreover, his acclaim of a new humanistic age in hymns to freedom, humanity, harmony, friendship, nature, and other abstract concepts was clearly inspired not only by his infatuation with the ideas of the French Revolution but also by a deep reverence for Schiller, whose treatments of those same subjects are key building blocks in the poetry of German idealism. Even the meter and syntax of Hölderlin’s first lyric efforts are obvious products of his familiarity with Schiller’s language and forms.
Hölderlin’s Alcaic and Asclepiadean odes on nature, landscape, and love, written in Denkendorf and Maulbronn, are strongly subjective and self-oriented, weighed down by an almost oppressive intensity of reflection. The moods of Storm and Stress are clearly visible, as is Klopstock’s basic tone, in which personal experience is raised into a suprapersonal religious sphere. Amid trivial occasional verse, sentimentally broad discourses on life, and curiously sad love poems written to Nast, there are already glimmerings of the elements that eventually informed Hölderlin’s more characteristic lyrics. For example, “Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele” (“The Immortality of the Soul”), an ode that bears all the marks of Klopstock’s manner, anticipates in direction and perception the later “Hymne an die Unsterblichkeit” (“Hymn to Immortality”), which was written in Tübingen. In the long hexameter poem “Die Teck” (“The Teck”), a glorification of a local mountain area, important themes of the late hymns appear: the Dionysian festival of the grape harvest, the sublime nature of dead heroes, the magnificence of the forested landscape saturated with the traditions of the fatherland, and the celebration of friendship.
A MISSION AND A SPIRITUAL HOMELAND
An important focus of the works created in Tübingen is Hölderlin’s growing preoccupation with the awareness of a personal poetic mission. From the rejection of seminary life’s inhibiting restrictions in “Zornige Sehnsucht” (“Angry Longing”) to the magnification and praise of Greece, the Muses, and his personal gods in a first formal cycle of hymns, Hölderlin’s formulations stress his belief in a calling to reinterpret Christian and classical ideals within the framework of his own era. He saw himself as a kind of prophet in a time of special revelation that needed poetic amplification. Accordingly, in the hymns, he presented aspects of a holy message based on the eternal example of antiquity. A pantheistic view of nature as a complex of ethical and emotional forces unified by a grand, divine essence charges the poems with living, vital myth in the creation of an ideal, harmonious realm that is the final goal of the poet’s longing, both for himself and for all humankind.
The evocation of Greece as Hölderlin’s spiritual homeland, which begins in earnest in the Tübingen hymns, is fleshed out, solidified, and given its ultimate direction in the verse that emerged alongside Hyperion in Frankfurt. Peculiarly combined with the reincarnation of the ancient Greek spirit in Diotima (Susette Gontard), the poet’s priestess of love and embodiment of eternal beauty, is a new, no longer effulgent picture of Hellas that contains sorrow, suffering, and tragic elements. Intense passion is intertwined with philosophical thoughtfulness in poetry characterized by its hearty enthusiasm, expression that is still youthfully immature, and fantastic, sensitive landscapes that are painted with fine feeling. Special emphasis is placed on quiet loveliness and the constancy of nature in a worldview that perceives life as originating in and striving toward childlike harmony. The most representative poems of this period are “Diotima,” the first lyric fruit of a newly gained perception of love as a power that can suspend the continuity of time and bring to pass the rebirth of man, and “Hyperions Schicksalslied” (“Hyperion’s Song of Destiny”), a penetrating treatment of the fathomlessness of existence that calls to mind Plato’s separation of the realm of ideas from the world of phenomena.
DARK THEMES OF LATER YEARS
To a large extent, the significant poetic works that were written prior toHölderlin’s hasty departure from Frankfurt in 1798, and even those created shortly thereafter in Homburg, served as preliminary studies in language, form, and theme for the magnificent odes, elegies, and hymns that he wrote after 1800. It is somewhat ironic that his most sublime and deeply profound poems are the darkly mythological, prophetically intuitive visions of a mind on the brink of insanity. The ever-increasing emotional strain and existential pressure of his life without Susette served as a catalyst for the final refinement of ideas and structures that are the very essence of the night ode “Chiron,” the wonderful elegy “Brot und Wein” (“Bread and Wine”), and the richly mysterious hymn “Patmos.” In these and other masterworks of his final productive years, Hölderlin revealed more than ever before his quiet sensitivity, his pure and free view of nature, his precise sense of landscape saturated with the spirit of a creative life force.
Despite their diversity, the mature poems are linked together in a fusion of classical and Christian traditions that places the gods of ancient Greece and Christ on nearly equal footing. The twofold experience of the proximity of the divine and humanity’s difficulty in understanding it forms the core of a poetry that is remarkable for its combination of tangible and ethereal elements. Important aspects of the integral system that is perfected and presented in these late writings include a hierarchical chain of genius-beings who govern absolute existence—Christ, the gods of Olympus, biblical prophets and patriarchs, apostles, Greek Titans, heroes, philosophers, great contemporary figures, spirits of nature and love; stress on the relationship of humans with Mother Earth; a poetic landscape that is saturated with powers that point toward the divine origins of life; and constant awareness of the prophetic task of the singer’s art and of the conflict between suffering and joy. All these are expressed in language and rhythms that are pregnant with expectation, careful preparation, and unspoken faith. In many respects, it is not so much the imparted vision as the clarity, musicality, and exactness of diction and the expressive perfection and beauty of form that elevate the lyric works of Hölderlin’s last creative surge to the level of true greatness.
THE TÜBINGEN HYMNS
A mélange of the revolutionary spirit of the times and interpretation of the basic Christian humanist tradition as mediated by Klopstock and Schiller, Hölderlin’s Tübingen hymns are all variations on the same feeling: an endless willingness of heart to accept eternal values. The celebration of inalienable human rights—freedom, equality, friendship, honor—is filled with the youthful impetuousness of the poet’s faith blended with a certain naïve tenderness and grace. Although not especially original in vocabulary, meter, and imagery, clearly influenced by models such as Schiller’s “An die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”), these early poems convey the charm of their creator’s exuberant enthusiasm, the animating tension that is central to his later works, and the loveoriented metaphysical basis of his worldview.
While the hymns do not belong to the poetry of experience, they can be described only loosely as idea poems. To be sure, they are thematically abstract, but their focus is not thought and allegory, as in Schiller’s philosophical lyrics. Rather, it is a kind of fundamentally religious perception of the universe in which theoretical principles are given semidivine status. Various common symbols are employed with significant frequency. The mountain typically represents freedom or pride; the eagle stands for courage. Humility and the eternal flow of life appear as valley and river respectively. All nature thus becomes a boundless ideal whole that is the object of intense longing and the source of repeated spiritual ecstasy.
In each of the hymns, the glorification of a concept that has been elevated to godhood is presented in a clearly defined structure. First, the poet approaches the chosen divinity. A central portion of the poem then elaborates the abstract deity’s sphere of operation. A triumphant view of the addressed entity’s power and domain is climaxed by the poet’s humble retreat into recognition of his own inadequacy.
Especially representative of the Tübingen songs are “Hymn to Immortality” and “Hymne an die Freiheit” (“Hymn to Freedom”). The former begins with the flight of the prophet-singer’s spirit, powered by love, to the divine realm of endless life. The first stanza evokes two of the major themes of Hölderlin’s oeuvre: the poet’s godly mission as a seer who penetrates the revelation of creation, and love as the driving force, sacred center, and unifying essence of the world. The joyful intoxication of the vision, however, gradually recedes, leaving in the final lines only emptiness in the realization that human mortality makes it impossible for people to grasp and describe in song the unspeakable fulfillment of the immortal soul. “Hymn to Freedom” develops the idea that people can be completely free within the context of their intended holy life only if they remain true to the blessed laws of love that govern pure existence. By falling away from these divine ideals, humans subject themselves to the shame of hell. Anticipating the hope-filled resolution of the late hymns, the poem ends with the suggestion of a final attainment of freedom in the eternity beyond death.
NACHTGESÄNGE
In 1805, Hölderlin published a small collection of nine poems under the title Nachtgesänge. Although this group constitutes less than a third of his mature odes, it forms the core of his late production of Alcaic and Asclepiadean forms. The individual lyric creations are carefully refined renderings of Hölderlin’s characteristic themes: the eternal existence of the Greek soul that still governs human action; the glorious mission of poets as magi ordained by the gods to be mediators of divine truth; the pain of separation and the never-ending tension between humans and the deity; spiritual reconciliation of the homeless singer’s sorrow; and anticipation of the dawning of a new age in the gods’ return. Accentuation of formal precision dominates a presentation that varies musically between lightly melodic language and dynamically passionate rhythms with heavily resounding vowels. Although love still appears as the binding force of extended nature, the motivating principle that gives these poems their special depth and flavor is an awareness of the tragic dominance of night.
Symbolically, night is the time of God’s absence. It is the predominant feature of the entire era following the decline of classical civilization and the appearance of Christ. Ordained by the gods, it is endowed with sacred meaning and purpose, yet the poet longs for it to end in a bright revelation of light and for that reason faces its darkness with feelings that fluctuate between humble resignation and profound distress and pain.
Especially notable in the development of key odes is Hölderlin’s tendency to frame his ideas in less demanding works, then to allow them to evolve in more complex versions that give full substance and direction to his message. Significant examples include “Der blinde Sänger” (“The Blind Singer”) and its reinterpretation in “Chiron” and “Der gefesselte Strom” (“The Chained Stream”), rewritten as “Ganymed.” “The Blind Singer” is an Alcaic ode that couches the theme of night in the problem of the poet’s loss of sight. In the darkness, his creations lack inspiration, regained only when the gods restore his vision in new revelation. In “Chiron,” the sightless singer-seer is transformed into a different symbol, the centaur Chiron, a healer who is struck by the arrow of the gods. The product of his wound is at once torment and ecstasy in apocalyptic visions of the cosmos. Like the blind poet, he is visited by the gods in a storm and sees a strong light break forth that gives everything order and harmony. “The Chained Stream,” one of Hölderlin’s most powerful celebrations of natural forces, is comparable to Goethe’s “Mahomets Gesang” (“Mahomet’s Song”) in its vibrant imagery and pure musicality. The icebound stream, awakened from the night of winter by spring, arouses all nature to joy-filled life. In “Ganymed,” the stream evolves into a symbol for the poet’s feeling of aloneness in the world of mortals. It becomes the half-divine stranger Ganymed, whose only place of fulfillment and belonging lies in reconciliation with the gods in the arms of Zeus.
MOURNFUL ELEGIES
Hölderlin’s most pronounced merging of classical Greek and Christian elements occurs in mournful elegies that combine lament for the passing of the golden age with deeply felt disappointment at the hollowness of contemporary reality. Overwhelming resignation is only partially offset by hope for the spiritual regeneration of humans. In tone, these poems are closely related to the mature odes, especially in their emphasis on night as the bridge between past and future. Their main thrust is to justify the poetic act in a dark age that destroys the very foundation of lyric art. Employing various approaches to the problem, Hölderlin examines the violent spiritual conflicts that characterize the situation of the modern lyricist. He is presented as being kept from fulfilling his divinely appointed mission by a cold era that needs his uplifting mediation more than ever. Notable is the acute awareness of the poet’s homelessness in his own time; this condition is caused at least in part by his inability to forsake the Greek tradition in favor of pure belief in Christ as the only redeeming force in the world.
Two elegies stand out as representative examples of Hölderlin’s mastery of this particular verse form. The most famous is “Menons Klagen um Diotima” (“Menon’s Laments for Diotima”), a creation that is dominated by the experience of the author’s separation from Susette Gontard. Equally powerful is the intensely mysterious “Bread and Wine,” in which the figure of Christ is merged with elements of Greek gods and heroes and transformed into the wine god Bacchus at the center of a Dionysian vision of ancient Greece.
“Menon’s Laments for Diotima” is a cyclical drama of the soul that begins with the separation of lovers, vacillates between the poet’s resigned acceptance of the situation and longing for reunion, and ends with a prayer of thanksgiving for the hope of fulfillment in a new union beyond death. As the poem crescendos in the third section, the music of total isolation and loneliness gives way to harmonies of belief in an indissoluble relationship. The mystical conception that within the absolute context of existence true lovers can never lose each other leads in the final segments to the victory of a faith whose eternal beacon is Diotima.
In “Bread and Wine,” Hölderlin comes to grips with night and emptiness in a deeply mystical revelation of the poet’s role in bringing to pass the return of the gods. The invocation of darkness allows a hidden light to shine forth. From within its fire, a bright manifestation of Greece emerges, and the poet becomes a priest of Dionysus who prepares the way for a new encounter between humans and the divine. Special power arises from those parts of the poem in which concrete reality (images of evening in a small town) merges with images reflecting the fulfillment of the past and the promise of the future.
The tension between classical Greek and Christian traditions that animates all Hölderlin’s mature lyrics is balanced in his Pindaric hymns by a strong mood of reconciliation and striving for harmony. Written in free verse but subject to complex structural rules, these poems are triadically arranged songs of prophetic awareness and dark, mythological, symbolic language. They treat the mysteries of life, death, and the gods in apocalyptic revelations of strange majesty that touch upon all of Hölderlin’s major themes. Perhaps nowhere else in his work did he couch his view of the poet’s relationship to eternity in such strong imagery of commitment, obedience, and worship.
EMPHASIS ON CHRIST
Especially significant in the late hymns is a more pronounced emphasis on Christ as the center of metaphysical contemplation. At this point in his life, Hölderlin’s attitude toward the Messiah was extremely complex. The Savior figure of his poetic visions is therefore something of a composite of Germanic hero, Greek Titan, and embodiment of the eternal principle of love in which the everlasting presence of God is manifest anew. Particularly noticeable characteristics of the Christ who triumphs over suffering are a sensitive look of naïve piety, peaceful radiance of bearing, and a sense of mythic uniqueness.
In one of the crowning achievements of his artistic career, the profoundly beautiful hymn “Patmos,” Hölderlin embarks on a haunting journey to the scene of Saint John’s revelation in search of lingering evidence of the living Christ. The poem focuses on the stark tragedy of the Crucifixion as a symbol for the terror of divine absence that is overcome only in a process of sharing. The key concept is that of community, of the impossibility of grasping God alone. Musical cadences, forceful individual words, and rhythmic presentation of ideas are among the structural features that illuminate the landscape of the poet’s spiritual universe.
Despite the victorious tone of most of the hymns, none of them documents total resolution of the dilemma generated by the poet’s continuing allegiance to both the Greek gods and Christ. This fact is hammered home most dramatically in “Der Einzige” (“The Only One”), in which Christ’s position of unique godhood clashes with the singerprophet’s desire to glorify all the gods because he cannot reconcile successfully their conflicting claims. By proclaiming Christ the brother of Bacchus and Hercules, Hölderlin attempts to make visible the painful conflict that arises from the very essence of the dual European heritage of his own origins. In so doing, he also creates a deeply personal symbol for a worldview that stands at the center of a lyric oeuvre that is matched in importance for the history of German poetry by the creations of few other writers.
OTHER MAJOR WORKS
LONG FICTION: Hyperion: Oder, Der Eremit in Griechenland, 1797, 1799 (Hyperion: Or, The Hermit in Greece, 1965).
PLAYS: Antigone, pb. 1804 (translation of Sophocles); Oedipus Tyrannus, pb. 1804 (translation of Sophocles); Der Tod des Empedokles, pb. 1826 (The Death of Emped ocles, 1966).
MISCELLANEOUS: Sämtliche Werke, 1846 (2 volumes); Sämtliche Werke: Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 1943-1977 (8 volumes).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, William S. Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language Ater Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot. Albany: State University of New York, 2007. An examination of the poetry of Hölderlin, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Blanchot with emphasis on poetic language.
Babich, Babette E. Words in Blood, like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Compares and contrasts the works of Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. Contains topics such as philosophy and the poetic essence of thought.
Constantine, David. Hölderlin. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1988. Substantial introduction to Hölderlin’s life and work. The author seeks to write about Hölderlin chronologically and in an accessible way and to explore his life as a resource in the explication of his writing. Emphasizes Hölderlin as a poet of religious longing.
Fioretos, Arts, ed. The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Includes essays on philosophical and theological aspects of Hölderlin’s work, his theory and practice of translation, and his poetry, ranging from early poems to uncompleted late hymns.
Heidegger, Martin. Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. Amherst, Mass.: Humanity Books, 2000. Six essays on Hölderlin by the major twentieth century philosopher Heidegger, with an introduction by the translator. The goal is to be of use to the public as well as the scholar and includes the German as well as the English versions of the four poems to which Heidegger has devoted his essays. Emphasis is on the relationship of Hölderlin’s poetry to modern European philosophy.
Henrich, Dieter, ed. The Course of Remembrance, and Other Essays on Hölderlin. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. A collection of essays on the ideas and the works of Hölderlin offering a glimpse of the early formation of German idealism. Contains a translation of Henrich’s book devoted to Hölderlin’s poem, “Remembrance.” A vital resource for specialists and enthusiasts of the German Enlightenment and Romantic traditions.
Laplanche, Jean. Hölderlin and the Question of the Father. Edited and translated by Luke Carson. Victoria, B.C.: ELS Editions, 2007. Examines the life and works of Hölderlin with respect to his mental illness.
Lernout, Geert. The Poet as Thinker: Hölderlin in France. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. A comprehensive historical survey of the reception of the poet’s work by French critics and writers. Includes chapters on Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, the French Revolution in Hölderlin’s thought, and psychoanalytic theories about Hölderlin’s illness. Also includes a chapter on the influence of Hölderlin on such important French authors as Albert Camus, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Sollers.
Ungar, Richard. Friedrich Hölderlin. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A basic and useful introduction to Hölderlin. Includes summaries and paraphrases of Hölderlin’s poetry together with interpretations. Intended to assist readers who are encountering Hölderlin for the first time and to provide an understanding of the texts at the most elementary level. Includes chronology and annotated bibliography.
Lowell A. Bangerter