Volume 15, Number 9 · November 19, 1970
The Riddle of Hölderlin
By Paul de Man
Poems and Fragments
by Friedrich Hölderlin. (bilingual edition), translations by Michael Hamburger
University of Michigan, 642 pp., $10.00
When Hölderlin's first works began to circulate in Germany in the 1790s, they met with limited response. Hölderlin was known to be a man of considerable poetic and intellectual power: both Hegel and Schelling, who had been his fellow-students at the theological seminary in Tübingen, had been struck by his genius, and Schiller had taken it upon himself to sponsor the literary beginnings of the younger poet who, like himself, was of Swabian birth. But, from the very beginning, something unsettling in his personality and in his poetry, a combination of tense abstraction and exalted fervor, created a barrier between Hölderlin and his contemporaries, and forced him into isolation. Goethe, dismissing some of his earlier poetic attempts as lacking in humanity and concreteness, paid little attention to him; even Schiller, who had sponsored the publication of the early novel Hyperion, lost sight of the man he had considered his most promising disciple.
Review, 6206 words
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