Friedrich Hölderlin

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (March 20, 1770 – June 6, 1843) was a major German lyric poet. His work bridges the Classical and Romantic schools.

Work

The poetry of Hölderlin, widely recognized today as one of the highest points of German and Western literature, was quite forgotten very soon – his illness and reclusion made him fade from his contemporaries' consciousness – and, even though selections of his work were being published by his friends already during his lifetime, it was largely ignored for the rest of the 19th century, Hölderlin being classified as a mere imitator of Schiller, a romantic and melancholy youth. (He would be rediscovered, by Norbert von Hellingrath, only in the 20th century).

Related Topics:
Literature - 19th century - Norbert von Hellingrath - 20th century

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In fact, Hölderlin was a man of his time, an early supporter of the French Revolution – in his youth at the Seminary of Tübingen, he and some colleagues from a "republican club" planted a "Tree of Freedom" in the market square, prompting the Grand-Duke himself to admonish the students at the seminary. He was at first carried away by Napoleon, whom he honors in one of his couplets (it should be noted that his exact contemporary Beethoven also initially dedicated his Eroica to the Corsican general).

Related Topics:
French Revolution - Napoleon - Beethoven - Eroica

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Like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Schiller, his older contemporaries, Hölderlin was a fervent admirer of ancient Greek culture, but had a very personal understanding of it. Much later, Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers would recognize in him the poet who first acknowledged the orphic and dionysiac Greece of the mysteries, which he would fuse with the Pietism of his native Swabia in a highly original religious experience. For Hölderlin, the Greek gods were not the plaster figures of conventional classicism, but living, actual presences, wonderfully life-giving and, at the same time, terrifying. He understood and sympathized with the Greek idea of the tragic fall, which he expressed movingly in the last stanza of his Hyperions Schicksalslied ("Hyperion's Song of Destiny").

Related Topics:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Greek - Friedrich Nietzsche - Orphic - Dionysiac - Mysteries - Pietism - Swabia - Greek gods - Tragic fall

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In the great poems of his maturity, Hölderlin would generally adopt a large-scale, expansive and unrhymed style. Together with these long hymns and elegies – which included Der Archipelagus ("The Archipelago"), Brot und Wein ("Bread and Wine") and Patmos – he also cultivated a crisper, more concise manner in epigrams and couplets, and in short poems like the famous Hälfte des Lebens ("The Middle of life"). In his years of madness, he would occasionally pen ingenuous rhymed quatrains, sometimes of a childlike beauty, which he would sign with fantastic names, such as Scardanelli. Some went so far as to claim that his late poems written in the asylum (the so-called "tower poems"), full of "Homeric beauty", were the crystallization of his thoughts, and thus the greatest part of his works; and that his madness was indeed a voluntary one. Such claims are generally dismissed as romantic exaggeration today.

Related Topics:
Scardanelli - Homeric - Crystallization - Voluntary - Romantic - Exaggeration

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