HÖLDERLIN, FRIEDRICH. - German poet, Protestant, b. at Lauffen on the Neckar on 20 March 1770, d. at Tübingen on 7 June 1843. His life was a pilgrimage ever more restless (materially as well) toward the most intimate part of himself and of being, two aspects that came increasingly to coincide, the more they converged in a god understood in a resolutely pantheistic way.
As a student, he collaborated intimately with Schelling and Hegel and became passionately devoted to Kant, Plato and Spinoza: philosophers linked to one another by an "idealism" of "mathematical" structure; nor can the bond with Schiller cause surprise, for he helped H. with keen interest and his influence on the Hymns, which first brought H. fame, is indisputable. In the period 1796-98, in Frankfurt, his fervent love for Susette Gontard, mother of the children whose tutor H. had become, was born and died owing to adverse circumstances. The epistolary novel Hyperion, lyrical and absorbed in character, bears witness to this. Ever more pronounced became the conflict between the mystical exaltation of the god who dwells in every thing, giving it the value it possesses, and the discord of every thing from god.
This conflict, still overcome in the Odes through expectation and hope, would lead H., psychologically, to madness, in which he would remain for forty years, until his death; but, poetically, it would express itself in a language that breaks every "orthodox" syntax, in a Pindaric atmosphere, to which the translations of the Greek lyric poet had preluded; the lyrical outpourings of the Hymns and the Elegies burst forth in succession, drawing on one another through the innate, necessary secret bond of image and color, and flow immersed and connected in the melodic wave. With this language, outside of every "logical" connection, H. perfectly realizes his god of whom every thing is reality.
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