Hölderlin was a genius poet and madman: he suffered greatly. He was friends with the mightiest philosophic and poetic minds of Germany, like Schiller, Hegel, and Schelling. He even met Goethe at one point, who viewed him and his poetic potential favorably. He was the consummate “Romantic,” writing at the time of high German literary and philosophic output, the era of von Herder and Sturm und Drang. He was a moody child, a literary visionary, and a prophetic poet. He was also difficult to deal with, erratic, idiosyncratic, and melancholic. He had a strained relationship with his sister and his manipulative mother. (His father passed away when he was but a little boy.) Today, he probably would be diagnosed with something like manic-depression and schizophrenia. Disillusioned with philosophy, by 1800 he gave up any hope of achieving a formal academic post and committed himself to writing poetry. “Never fear the poet when he rages; his letter Kills, but his spirit to spirits gives new vigour, new life” (The Angry Poet); “Ich aber bin allein…Viel offenbaret der Gott…Manche helfen Dem Himmel. Diese siehet, Der Dichter. Gut ist es, an andern sich, Zu halten. Denn keiner trägt das Leben allein” (The Titans). 

As it turned out, Hölderlin would have to brave this life alone. In 1802 the mother of the pupil he was tutoring, his love interest and muse (Susette Gontard, his “Diotima”) died, and he nearly went insane. In 1804, the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling thought his friend’s condition was improving. However, by 1807, at the behest of his mother, he was forcibly removed from Homburg and taken to a mental institution, the Autenrieth clinic in Tübingen. There he was subjected to the Autenrieth mask (a device to stop patients from screaming), the straightjacket, and torturous submersions into frigid water inside a cage (p. xxxv, introduction). The treatment “worked” inasmuch as it absolutely broke him. He fell into a “catatonic stupor,” and was taken in by an amiable and generous carpenter family, the Zimmers. He had read his novel Hyperion and admired Hölderlin’s work. Hölderlin was given three months to live; ironically, there he would live for the next thirty-six years until his death.

The majority of Hölderlin’s output was in one singular decade from 1797-1807. His magnum opus, Hyperion was published in two parts in 1797 and 1799 respectively. To frame the time period for the reader, Kant’s second edition (the one that really made the splash) of his Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1787; Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism was published in 1800; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807; and Goethe’s Faust, part I, was published in 1808. Lastly, reading Hölderlin in the German is essential, even if you read the English and compare it with the German, or read the German after reading the English. Translating Hölderlin, at least to me, is probably not as hard as translating Mallarmé, but it does pose its difficulties. Hölderlin used wonderful repetition and wrote in some bizarre meters (like translating Pindar’s Odes into German).

Hölderlin invites us to open our eyes yet again to the Gods, and condemns those who speak of them contemptuously. “Cold hypocrites, of gods do not dare to speak!” (The Sanctimonious Poet). He cries out to the God of Time, the Sun, the Moon, and the Air. Indeed, his parents were Kronos, Helios, Selene/Diana, and Vater Aether; indeed, he was raised by the gods, “Im Arme der Götter wuchs ich groß” (In My Boyhood Days). The pastoral life was divinized, the simple life wherein mankind dwells with the gods, the fates, the sprites, and the gods dwell with man. Yet Hölderlin’s gods are not distant Epicurean gods in the intermundia. Rather, his gods need us as much as we need them. “Mute is the Delphian god, and desolate, long now deserted…But the light above speaks kindly to mortals as ever, full of promises, hints, and the great Thunderer’s voice, it Cries: do you think of me? and the sorrowing wave of the Sea God echoes back: do you never think of me now, as you once did? (The Archipelago). “But their own immortality Suffices the gods, and if The Heavenly have need of one thing, It is of heroes and human beings And other mortals…Then gods and mortals celebrate their nuptials, All the living celebrate, And Fate for a while Is leveled out, suspended (The Rhine). 

The “Golden Age” that Hölderlin was pining for was a return to a distant age of the past that he, at some point, genuinely thought he could exhort his Patria, Germany, to return to. Eventually, however, he became disillusioned that Germany did not take this “turn” as he had hoped for which caused him great distress. Hölderlin thereupon turned inward and created his idyllic utopia through his poetry, the only vehicle he had in order to find stability, satisfaction, and divine community, even if he was the lone individual to go on this venture. “So too would I go home, had I Reaped as much wealth as I’ve gathered sorrow…For they who lend us heavenly light and fire, The gods, with holy sorrow endow us too. So be it, then, A son of Earth I Seem; and was fashioned to love, to suffer (Home). Hölderlin knew that his vocation as a poet was necessary even if his visions did not engender change. To be sure, his work was largely ignored during his lifetime, and he died in relative obscurity. “Who wants poets,” he lamented, “at all in lean years?” (Bread and Wine).

In my opinion, Hölderlin’s genius poem of poems is “Patmos.” In it, Hölderlin is caught up in a similar fashion as St. John the Revelator imprisoned on the island of Patmos. The poem commences in a haunting quatrain:

“Near is
And difficult to grasp, the God.
But where danger threatens
That which saves from it also grows.”

(Heidegger would quote this as a portent at the end of his essay on technology.) Hölderlin begins by describing his native land, and soon is caught up in a vision and transported to “Asia” where he finds himself wrestling with identifying in order to praise this saving power. Who is it that shall save? Is it the gods? Is it a Christ? Who does Zeus, the Thunderer send? Is it the son of God? Is it the son of Zeus, Dionysus? “From the thundering god issues the gladness of wine. Therefore in tasting them we think of the Heavenly who once were Here and shall come again, come when their advent is due; Therefore also the poets in serious hymns to the wine-god Never idly devised, sound that most ancient one’s praise” (Bread and Wine). Dionysus, the god of wine, the son of god shall come again, and his advent is nigh. He shall take us in an ecstatic caravan, dancing in mirth and quaffing draughts of wine.

But also, “Meanwhile, though, to us shadows comes the Son of the Highest, Comes the Syrian and down into our gloom bears his torch. Blissful the wise men see it; in souls that were captive there gleams a Smile, and their eyes shall yet thaw in response to the light” (Bread and Wine).

In Bread and Wine, Hölderlin writes how mankind became accustomed to the heavenly light of the gods, and they became proud and ungrateful. They built big cities and empires only to worship themselves and forsake the gods. So the gods depart, and forsake mankind; yet, each one needs the other. “Why no more does a god imprint on the brow of a mortal, Struck, as by lightning, the mark, brand him, as once he would do?…Little they seem to care whether we live or do not” (Bread and Wine). “The Syrian,” ultimately his Christ-like figure who saves the world and reconciles mankind back to the gods. In this, he attempted to reconcile Ancient Greece and Christianity in order to bring Germany back to communion, as it were. “You Graces of Hellas, you daughters Of Heaven, I went to you, So that, if the journey is not too far, You may come to us, beloved ones” (The Journey).

Jesus’ body is the bread (Matt 26:26). And “Bread is a fruit of the earth” (Bread and Wine). Dionysus gives freely of his wine, yet so do the Christ (Matt 26:28). In the end, we are left wondering who it is that Hölderlin is praising in his Bread and Wine. In the end, however, it might not matter much; for we trust in the saving power of the God, who shall reconcile the Heavenly back with the Earthly; the divine back with the human; the sons of the Most High with the sons of the Earth. “Dreams more gentle and sleep in the arms of Earth lull the Titan, Even that envious one, Cerberus, drinks and lies down” (Bread and Wine). Or in other words, “the wolf shall lie with the lamb (Is 11:6). Who shall we praise? Hölderlin spent his life suffering, and yet always in gratitude to God.

“To praise what’s higher: for this the
God gave me speech and a heart that is grateful” (To Princess Augusta of Homburg).