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Part of the book: The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin

David J. Constantine

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 12

Modern Humanities Research Association

RomanticismGermanPoetryopen

Abstract.  Just as there is a Homeric world and a world of Dante or of Thomas Hardy, so too, although of a different kind, there is a Hölderlin world, one he has created, in which he works out his themes and with which his name may always be associated. It is characteristically his, the creation of one man. Its form and salient features can be understood only through him, because the world was shaped in the likeness of his ideas. The purpose of this first chapter is to define, briefly, the nature of Hölderlin's world, seen at its most coherent in the mature poetry of 1800-02, a world which has something of the three types mentioned, but which is not entirely any one of them; and also to begin to consider the imaginative processes by which such a world is created, to consider what kind of poetic intelligence Hölderlin's was. Note cues in this chapter refer to endnotes in the end matter of the book.

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