Born: Lauffen, Germany, 20 March 1770. Education: Educated at Latin school, Nurtingen, 1776-84; theological seminary, Denkendorff, 1784-86, and Maulbronn, 1786-88; Tubingen Seminary, 1788-93, master of philosophy, 1790. Career: Tutor to son of Charlotte von Kalb, in Waltershausen, 1793-94, and in Weimar, 1794-95; lived in Jena, 1795; tutor to son of Herr Gontard, Frankfurt, 1795-98; tutor in house of Herr Gonzenbach, Hauptweil, Switzerland, 1801, and of a German official in Bordeaux, 1801-02; librarian, Homburg, 1804-06. Mentally ill after 1805: confined first in clinic in Tubingen, 1806-07, and privately after 1807. Died: 7 June 1843.
Publications
Collections
Samtliche Werke, edited by Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck. 8 vols., 1943-85.
Samtliche Werke und Briefe, edited by Gunter Mieth. 4 vols., 1970. Samtliche Werke, edited by Dietrich E. Sattler. 1975-
Verse
Gedichte, edited by Gustav Schwab and Ludwig Uhland. 1826.
Selected Poems, translated by J.B. Leishman. 1944.
[Selection], translated by Michael Hamburger. 1943; revised edition, 1952; revised edition as Selected Verse, 1961. Alcaic Poems (bilingual edition), translated by Elizabeth Henderson. 1962.
Poems and Fragments (bilingual edition), edited and translated by Michael Hamburger. 1966; revised edition, 1980. Selected Poems (with Selected Poems by Morike), translated by Christopher Middleton. 1972.
Hymns and Fragments (bilingual edition), translated by Richard Sieburth. 1984.
Selected Verse, edited and translated by Michael Hamburger. 1986.
Selected Poems, translated by David Constantine. 1990.
Fiction
Hyperion; oder, Der Eremit in Griechenland. 2 vols., 1797-99; as Hyperion; or, the Hermit in Greece, translated by Willard R. Trask, 1965.
Hyperion and Selected Poems, edited by Eric L. Santer. 1990.
Other
Ausgewahlte Briefe, edited by Wilhelm Bohm. 1910.
Briefe, edited by Erich Lichtenstein. 1922.
Gesammelte Briefe, edited by Ernst Bertram. 1935.
Briefe, edited by Friedrich Seeba. 1944.
Briefe zur Erziehung, edited by K. Lothar Wolf. 1950.
Einundzwanzig Briefe, edited by Bertold Hack. 1966.
Essays and Letters of Theory, edited and translated by Thomas Pfau. 1988.
Holderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone, translated by David Constantine, 2001.
Translator, Die Trauerspiele des Sophokles. 2 vols., 1804-06.
Critical Studies:
Holderlin by Ronald Peacock, 1938; Holderlin by Agnes Stansfield, 1944; Holderlin by L.S. Salzberger, 1952; A Study of Holderlin by R.D. Miller, 1958; Holderlins Elegie ”Brot und Wein”: Die Entwicklung des hymnischen Stils in der elegischen Dichtung by Jochen Schmidt, 1968; Holderlin’s Hyperion: A Critical Reading by Walter Silz, 1969; The Young Holderlin by Roy C. Shelton, 1973; Holderlin and Greek Literature by Robin Burnett Harrison, 1975; Holderlin and Goethe by Eudo C. Mason, 1975; Holderlin’s Major Poetry: The Dialectics of Unity, 1975, and Friedrich Holderlin, 1984, both by Richard Unger; Holderlin and the Left: The Search for a Dialectic of Art and Life by Helen Fehervary, 1977; The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Holderlin, 1979, and Holderlin, 1988, both by David Constantine; Holderlin’s Hyperion by Howard Gaskill, 1984; Text, Geschichte und Subjektivitat in Holderlins Dichtung—”Unessbarer Schrift gleich” by Rainer Nagele, 1985; Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination by Eric L. Santer, 1986; Holderlin’s Silence by Thomas Eldon Ryan, 1988; Friedrich Holderlin: The Theory and Practice of Religious Poetry: Studies in the Elegies by Martin F.A. Simon, 1988; The Problem of Christ in the Work of Friedrich Holderlin by Mark Ogden, 1991; Holderlin: The Poetics of Being by Adrian Del Caro, 1991; A Foretaste of Heaven: Friedrich Holderlin in the Context of WUrttemberg Pietism by Priscilla A. Hayden-Roy, 1994; The Poet as Thinker: Holderlin in France by Geert Lernout, 1994; Holderlin’s Hymn ”The Ister” by Martin Heidegger, translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis, 1996; Leaves of Mourning: Holderlin’s Late Work, With an Essay on Keats and Melancholy by Anselm Haverkamp, translated by Vernon Chadwick, 1996; The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Holderlin by Dieter Henrich, edited by Eckart Forster, 1997; Holderlin and the Dynamics of Translation by Charlie Louth, 1998; The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Holderlin, edited by Aris Fioretos, 1999; The Recalcitrant Art: Diotima’s Letters of Holderlin and Related Missives, edited and translated by Douglas F. Kenney and Sabine Menner-Bettscheid, 2000; Narrating Community After Kant: Schiller, Goethe, and Holderlin by Karin Schutjer, 2001.
Poetry—”this most innocent of occupations”—was Friedrich Holderlin’s vocation, and he had from the start the highest ambitions in it. His models as a young man were Pindar, Klopstock, and, closer to home, Schiller—whom he adulated, to his own detriment. He shared with his companions at school and in the seminary (several of them highly gifted) a passion for liberty excited by events in France, and a belief that poetry might, in its manner, serve the revolutionary cause. The regime in Wurttemberg, especially as it touched the students in Tubingen, was oppressive, and poetry served as a medium of revolt. The language of Holderlin’s early poems is often very violent; they depict the beleaguering of the Good, in whatever definition, by the forces of Wrong—of injustice, tyranny, philistinism, etc. In the Tubingen Hymns these oppositions are expressed in abstract terms, and the poetry suffers accordingly.
Holderlin was educated for the Church but avoided entry into it by taking the customary house-tutor jobs. In the second of these, in Frankfurt, he met and fell in love with Susette Gontard. Through her he found his own true poetic voice; Frankfurt, in a late fragment, he called ”the navel of the earth.” His first poems for her, whom he addressed as Diotima, are marvellously expressive of love and joy; thereafter, as social circumstances oppressed the lovers, he turned to lament and the determined celebration of the Good he was losing. The loss of Susette confirmed him in his elegiac character.
Holderlin had been working on the novel Hyperion before he met Susette (she had read fragments of it in Schiller’s Thalia), but meeting her he continued it as their book. ”Forgive me that Diotima dies,” he wrote. Hyperion, the modern Greek fighting for the recovery of the Hellenic Ideal in the abortive rising of 1770, sees his ideals founder in the bitterest fashion; his attempt to realize them costs him Diotima too. There is almost a will to failure in the book; as though the hero pushes the foreboding that he will fail to its ultimate proof, and salvages his ideals out of a wretched reality into the spirit.
Forced to leave the Gontard household Holderlin held out in nearby Homburg for as long as he could. There he schooled himself for his greatest poetry. He translated Pindar literally, to learn what his own German language might do; he reflected on the nature and practice of poetry, especially the crucial question of how form might express the spirit without imprisoning or travestying it. Further, he worked at the drama Empedokles; but having written extensive notes and attempted three versions, he abandoned the work. Attractive though the idea was and although much of the poetry, especially that of the second version, has an exciting vitality, in essence the conception itself was undramatic and could not have been executed satisfactorily.
The world of Holderlin’s mature poetry, of the great hymns and elegies, is conceived in very concrete terms: it can be mapped, it has two poles—Greece and Hesperia—and numerous renowned features— rivers, mountains, islands, and cities. It incorporates a simple idea (deriving from Herder but also from contemporary Pietist beliefs): that the Spirit of Civilization, having flourished in the East and most splendidly in Periclean Athens, will alight and flourish now north of the Alps, in Germany. The Revolutionary Wars, and the momentousness attaching to the turn of the century, inclined the determinedly optimistic Holderlin to believe in such a renaissance. In his cosmology we inhabit an Age of Night—initiated by Christ, the last of the Greek gods. We are benighted and await the new daylight; the poet’s task is to encourage us not to despair. This benighted age is characterized by restlessness and wandering; an ideal homeland (Holderlin’s childhood Swabia) is a focus of longing. These are not so much ideas or beliefs as poetic images of immense persuasive power; they express certain readily identifiable conditions: alienation, loss, nostalgia. The theme of Holderlin’s poetry is, in nuce: love in absence—how to survive and continue to hold to ideals in times of their manifest absence.
It will not do, when reading Holderlin, simply to abstract the above adumbrated scheme. That is paraphrase. Instead we have to attend to the rhythms of his poetry, which are very subtle. Contradictions (inclination to despair, insistence on hope, longing for the past, assertion of a better future) are expressed less in statement than in rhythm, in the running of the verse itself against the exact constraints of form. His handling of hexameters and the elegiac couplet is infinitely finer than Goethe’s or Schiller’s. There is a movement of tones in Holderlin’s verse, there are oscillations of feeling, shifts, transitions through discord and harmony. In a sense, the poems do not end; their constituent emotions have been so finely rendered that we feel them to be still in play. There is no neat conclusion, as of a logical argument. There could not be. The spirit resists such finality. In this manner, in what he himself called a ”loving conflict,” Holderlin’s poetry serves the cause of perpetual renewal, of revolt against oppression, deadness, and despair of whatever kind.
After the time in Bordeaux, after the death of Susette Gontard, Holderlin’s poetic world expanded and disintegrated. It is much to be regretted that his mind, because of illness, could not compose the terrific richness of his last creative years. There are moments of vision unlike any others in his poetry, of an intense sensuousness and particularity.
During his years in the tower, half his life, Holderlin wrote, very often to order, rhyming stanzas on the view through his window of the Neckar and the fields and hills beyond; or, less successfully, on abstract topics. These last poems are very moving, sometimes in their own flat simplicity (tension being a hallmark of the mature poetry) but often, alas, only as documents.
Nobody nowadays would be likely, as earlier generations did, to disregard anything Holderlin wrote on the grounds of his presumed insanity. In his life and in all his work he is a poet for our times. He confronts us with benightedness, and demonstrates the spirit’s will to survive.
