Friedrich Holderlin Biography and List of Works

One of the greatest German lyric poets who melded classical and Christian themes in his works. Among Hölderlin's major works is his novel HYPERION ODER DER EREMIT IN GRIECHENLAND (1797-99), expressing longing for ancient Greece. His actual career as a writer lasted only about a decade. Hölderlin's life was never settled or happy: he lacked both money and recognition and his socially suspect love affair with a married woman drove him insane in 1803.

"I am mortal, born to love and to suffer."

Hölderin was born in Lauffen am Neckar, Württemberg. He studied theology at the university of Tübingen, where he obtained a master's degree. In 1793 he was introduced to Friedrich von Schiller, who published some of his poems. The turning point in his life was, when he took post in a house of a wealthy Frankfurt banker Gontard. Hölderlin had a painful but platonic love affair with his employee's wife Susette, whom he called 'Diotima' in his poems. Their happiness was short-lived and ended by the husband. Hölderlin left Frankfurt in 1798 and went through a period of intense creativity, producing his great elegies and the second volume of HYPERION.

After working for a short time as a tutor at Bordeaux in France, Hölderin returned in 1802 to Germany in an advanced stage of schizophrenia. The last 36 years of his life Hölderin spent under the shadow of insanity, living in a carpenter's house in Tübingen. He died on June 7, 1843. In 1861 Friedrich Nietzsche, who died insane, wrote an enthusiastic essay on his "favourite poet", Hölderlin, who became six years after Nietzsche's essay widely recognized as Germany's greatest poet after Goethe.

MENSCHENBEIFALL

Ist nicht heilig mein Herz, schöneren Lebens voll,
seit ich liebe? warum achtetet ihr mich mehr,
da ich stolzer und wilder,
wortereicher und leerer war?

Ach! der Menge gefällt, was auf den Marktplatz taugt,
und es ehret der Knecht nur den Gewaltsamen;
an das Göttliche glauben die allein,
die es selber sind.

Hölderlin was not directly affiliated with either of the two major literary movements of his time, Weimar Classicism or Romanticism, but his thought has elements in common with both. Some of Hölderlin's finest lyrics are 'Brod und Wein', an elegy celebrating both Jesus and Dionysus, 'Der Archipelagus', an ode in which it is hoped that modern Germany will tend toward the character of ancient Greece, 'Heidelberg' and 'Der Rhein', odes on the city and the river, and the patriotic ode 'Germanien'.

"The greatest lyric poets, for instance Hölderlin or Keats, are men in whom the mythic power of insight breaks forth again in its full intensity and objectifying power..."
(Ernst Cassirer in Language and Myth, 1946)

In his use of classical verse forms and syntax, Hölderlin was follower of Friedrich Klopstock (1724-1803), who attempted to develop for the German language a classical perfection of its own that would place it on a par with Greek and Latin. Hölderlin shared the classicists' love of balance and repose. For this he added a romantic yearning for harmony with nature and elements of pantheism and Christian images. Like William Blake and W.B. Yeats, he explored cosmology and history for meaning, expression, and hope in an often hostile and uncertain world. Hölderlin also played a decisive role in the development of philosophy from Kant to Hegel, and hence in the formation of German Idealism. Hölderlin rejected the bourgeois goal of rational happiness, for him pleasure was but 'tepid water on the tongue'. Hölderlin felt homeless and like Kleist, Shelley or Pushkin he was worried to death by his age.

Nur einen Sommer gönnt, ihr Gewaltigen!
Und einen Herbst zu reifem Gesange mir,
Dass williger mein Herz, vom süssen
Spiele gesättiget, dann mir sterbe.
(from An die Parzen)

For further reading: Holderlin's Hyperion: A Critical Reading by Walter Silz (1969); Reading After Freud: Essays on Goethe, Holderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud by Rainer Nagele (1987); Holderlin's Silence by Thomas Eldon Ryan (1988); Holderlin by David Constantine (1988); Die Kunst Der Differenz by Eric Bolle (1988); Holderlin: The Poetics of Being by Adrian Del Caro (1990); Literature & Religion by Walter Jens, Hans Kung (1991); Holderlin and the Golden Chain of Homer by Emery E. George (1992); The Poet As Thinker: Holderlin in France by Geert Lernout (1994); Finding Time: Reading for Temporality in Holderlin and Heidegger by Timothy Torno (1995); Leaves of Mourning: Holderlin's Late Work, With an Essay on Keats and Melancholy by Anselm Haverkamp (1995); Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Holderlin by Hans-Jost Frey (1996); Holderlin's Hymn 'the Ister' by Martin Heidegger, et al (1996); The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Holderlin, ed. by Eckart Forster (1997); The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Holderlin, ed by Aris Fioretos (1999)

Note: Goethe's house in the Duchy of Weimar attracted writers: Friedrich Hölderlin was received well but the dramatist and storywriter Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1843) never recovered from the depression resulting from his rejection by Goethe. However, neither Goethe nor Schiller recognized Hölderlin's greatness.

Trivia: American writer Dan Simmon's took the title Hyperion for his science fiction saga (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, sequels: Endymion, The Rise of Endymion, the title Endymion referring to John Keats's unfinished long poem about the displacement of old gods.). The first volume was structured after Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: seven pilgrims have been called to the planet Hyperion and en route they tell tales contributing to the mosaic of the overall story. The first two parts were later published together, under the title Hyperion Cantos.

HYPERION ODER DER EREMIT IN GRIECHENLAND, (1797)