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Hölderlin and Poetic Transport
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Hölderlin and Poetic Transport

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2025) | Viewed by 5007

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Priscilla Hayden-Roy

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0315, USA
Interests: Friedrich Hölderlin; Württemberg Pietism; 16th- and 18th-century German literature

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

O Fittige gieb uns, treuesten Sinns
Hinüberzugehen und wiederzukehren.

                                    Hölderlin, Patmos

O pinions give us, with minds most faithful
To cross over and to return.

                                    (Transl. by Michael Hamburger)

This Humanities Special Issue on Friedrich Hölderlin offers a welcome opportunity to bring the current research on this singularly important German poet to a worldwide readership. With the hope of assembling a somewhat cohesive collection of essays, I have looked for a thread which both extends deeply into the rich complex of Hölderlin’s writings and which offers contributors sufficient leeway to explore a wide variety of approaches to these texts. The notion of “transport”—in the sense of crossing, transition, transfer, metaphor, translation—leads to some of the most significant issues found in Hölderlin’s writings. To name just a few: the problem of poetic vision as transport, ecstacy; the poet’s increasingly fraught task of mediating between the gods and the saeculum; cultural transfer (translatio studii) from East to West, from Greece to Hesperia; metaphor as both crossing (Übergang) and deviance/hybridicity; Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic practice of translation and its crossing into his poetry; the vexing, ideologically charged question of how to edit his later, palimpsestic manuscripts and convey them into print. Essays treating the translation of Hölderlin’s texts; the reception of his work by other poets and thinkers; the crossing of his work into other media (music, visual arts, theater, film), will also be welcome.

Prof. Dr. Priscilla Hayden-Roy
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Friedrich Hölderlin
  • German poet
  • transport
  • metaphor
  • translation

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 346 KiB  
Article
The Editing of the Erotic in Hölderlin’s Empedocles Project
by Priscilla Ann Hayden-Roy
Humanities 2025, 14(5), 104; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14050104 - 30 Apr 2025
Viewed by 149
Abstract
While the development of the Empedocles figure in the various versions of Hölderlin’s unfinished tragedy has long been the subject of scholarship, the shifts in his relationships to the women around him have largely gone unnoticed. Yet these changes are anything but subtle: [...] Read more.
While the development of the Empedocles figure in the various versions of Hölderlin’s unfinished tragedy has long been the subject of scholarship, the shifts in his relationships to the women around him have largely gone unnoticed. Yet these changes are anything but subtle: in the Frankfurt Plan, Empedocles is married with children, and his wife plays a significant role in the outline of the plot; in the first draft, Empedocles is unmarried but adored by Panthea, a young Agrigentine woman; in the last draft, the figure of Panthea has been reconfigured as Empedocles’ biological sister. With each successive draft Hölderlin imposed new barriers, the crossing of which would imply sexual transgression or incest, in order to set Empedocles apart from potential sexual or erotic entanglements with the dramatis personae. But at the same time, we observe language suited for erotic settings (and used thus by Hölderlin here and in other works) being displaced to ever new objects throughout the drafts. In other words, while the author as editor of his material successively deleted or prohibited the sexual/erotic relationships of his titular hero, at the same time he allowed this fluidly metonymic, multivalent erotic language to flow, continuously redirected, throughout the entire Empedocles project. With Empedocles’ leap into Mount Etna, we find the culmination of this meandering erotic diction, imagined in the last draft as an hybristic, incestuous union with his divine parents. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)
18 pages, 269 KiB  
Article
“Wenn dunkel mir ist der Sinn,/Den Kunst und Sinnen hat Schmerzen/Gekostet von Anbeginn” (“When Dark Are My Mind and Heart/Which Paid from the Beginning/In Grief for Thought and Art”): Hölderlin in the “Hölderlin Tower”—Contemporary and Modern Diagnoses of His Illness, and Literary (Self-)Therapy
by Gabriele von Bassermann-Jordan
Humanities 2025, 14(5), 101; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14050101 - 28 Apr 2025
Viewed by 207
Abstract
In 1802, Friedrich Hölderlin experienced his first mental breakdown, which was followed by a second one in 1805. On 15th September 1806, he was admitted to the clinic of Johann Heinrich Ferdinand von Autenrieth in Tübingen who addressed Hölderlin’s illness as “madness” (“Wahnsinn”). [...] Read more.
In 1802, Friedrich Hölderlin experienced his first mental breakdown, which was followed by a second one in 1805. On 15th September 1806, he was admitted to the clinic of Johann Heinrich Ferdinand von Autenrieth in Tübingen who addressed Hölderlin’s illness as “madness” (“Wahnsinn”). On 3rd May 1807, the poet was discharged as “incurable” (“unheilbar”). Until his death on 7th June 1843, he was cared for by the carpenter Ernst Zimmer. From the period between 1807 and 1843, 50 poems by Hölderlin have been preserved, in German studies known as the “Turmdichtung” (“tower poetry”). These poems have long been relegated to the margins of scholarly research. In my essay, I will discuss the modern and contemporary diagnoses, as well as Hölderlin’s literary (self-) therapy of his illness. I am suggesting that Hölderlin’s tower poetry contains a thera-peutic–poetic concept that is intended to serve the treatment of his illness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)
19 pages, 590 KiB  
Article
The Unity and Fragmentation of Being: Hölderlin’s Metaphysics of Life
by Edward Kanterian
Humanities 2025, 14(4), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14040092 - 17 Apr 2025
Viewed by 285
Abstract
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) is widely known as a poet and sometimes described as a poet’s poet (Heidegger). However, more recent interpretations, undertaken by Dieter Henrich, Michael Franz and others, have shown that he was a genuine philosopher as well, who had an original [...] Read more.
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) is widely known as a poet and sometimes described as a poet’s poet (Heidegger). However, more recent interpretations, undertaken by Dieter Henrich, Michael Franz and others, have shown that he was a genuine philosopher as well, who had an original conception of the relation between art, poetry and metaphysics, with neo-Platonic and theological roots. This paper reconstructs Hölderlin’s ideas and their relation to those of Kant and Fichte. Hölderlin emerges, on the interpretation offered here, as a metaphysician of life, a poet of the biosphere and as such most relevant to our present-day predicament. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)
30 pages, 456 KiB  
Article
Hölderlin’s and Novalis’ Philosophical Beginnings (1795)
by Manfred Frank
Humanities 2025, 14(4), 84; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14040084 - 1 Apr 2025
Viewed by 427
Abstract
Philosophers and literary scholars have notoriously struggled with the periodization of Hölderlin’s work, showing particular reluctance to situate it within Early Romanticism. But there can be no doubt that Hölderlin’s philosophical work resides within the context of an anti-foundationalist criticism, which students of [...] Read more.
Philosophers and literary scholars have notoriously struggled with the periodization of Hölderlin’s work, showing particular reluctance to situate it within Early Romanticism. But there can be no doubt that Hölderlin’s philosophical work resides within the context of an anti-foundationalist criticism, which students of Karl Leonhard Reinhold leveled at his programmatic deduction from a “highest principle” (oberster Grundsatz) in the early 1790s and intensified following Fichte’s lectures (1794/95) on the Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre). Novalis belonged directly to the circle of Reinhold students, while Hölderlin gained access to it through Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, his friend from student days in Tübingen and “mentor” in Jena. Niethammer encouraged both Hölderlin and Novalis to contribute to his Philosophisches Journal, conceived as a forum for discussing the pros and cons of foundational philosophy (Grundsatzphilosophie). Novalis’ Fichte-Studies and Hölderlin’s philosophical fragments from 1795/96 can be read as drafts for such an essay. Both men developed similar critiques of Reinhold’s reformulated, subject-centered “highest principle”, the “principle of consciousness” (Satz des Bewusstseins). They argued that according to Reinhold, self-consciousness is a representation, i.e., a binary relationship that provides no explanation for the certainty of unity associated with self-consciousness. Both postulate a transcendent “ground of unity”, which would address this issue while remaining inaccessible to consciousness. My article demonstrates that both men failed to disentangle themselves from the snares of Reinhold’s model of representation, and both transferred the solution for the problem of self-consciousness onto the extra-philosophical medium of art. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)
19 pages, 360 KiB  
Article
Hölderlin: Between Kant and the Greeks
by Àlex Mumbrú Mora
Humanities 2025, 14(4), 83; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14040083 - 1 Apr 2025
Viewed by 414
Abstract
In Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece, Hölderlin introduces two narrative planes: the description of action and the reflection (or memory) of past events. The transition between these points of view is facilitated by the extensive use of metaphor. This paper [...] Read more.
In Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece, Hölderlin introduces two narrative planes: the description of action and the reflection (or memory) of past events. The transition between these points of view is facilitated by the extensive use of metaphor. This paper examines Hölderlin’s use of metaphorical language through Plato’s conception of beauty as a link between the sensible and intelligible worlds and Kant’s notion of the “aesthetic idea” as an imaginative representation that “occasions much thinking” (viel zu denken veranlasst). This analysis shows how both sources constitute the theoretical framework for the construction of a New Mythology, as outlined in Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)
27 pages, 495 KiB  
Article
Symbolic Death and the Eccentric Sphere: “Remarks” on Hölderlin’s Oedipus
by Kristina Mendicino
Humanities 2024, 13(6), 175; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13060175 - 23 Dec 2024
Viewed by 798
Abstract
Insofar as the caesura of tragic temporality and the movement of “tragic transport’” are said to be shaped by a tendency toward the “eccentric sphere of the dead” in Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus”, the privileged position of this sphere within Hölderlin’s [...] Read more.
Insofar as the caesura of tragic temporality and the movement of “tragic transport’” are said to be shaped by a tendency toward the “eccentric sphere of the dead” in Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus”, the privileged position of this sphere within Hölderlin’s “Remarks” solicits further analysis of what this topos signifies within both Hölderlin’s poetological writings and his translation of Oedipus the King. How does the “eccentric sphere of the dead” relate to Hölderlin’s formal descriptions of the caesura that lends tragic succession a certain equilibrium, and what is implied in the qualification of this region as an “eccentric sphere”? How does the “eccentric sphere of the dead” register in the language of Sophocles’ tragedy? And conversely, what does the language of Oedipus the King indicate concerning the constitution and parameters of the “spheres” of the living and the dead? These are the questions that will be pursued in this essay, beginning with the broader resonance of the terms to which Hölderlin takes recourse in his “Remarks”, and proceeding to the ways in which the limits of life and death are articulated in Sophocles’ drama and Hölderlin’s translation. Those elaborations of the “eccentric sphere of the dead” will, in turn, allow for a reinterpretation of the more formal determinations of “tragic transport” that Hölderlin offers. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)
12 pages, 229 KiB  
Article
“And the Script Sounds”: Literary Hermeneutics and Imaginary Listening
by Rolf J. Goebel
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 107; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040107 - 19 Aug 2024
Viewed by 1551
Abstract
Friedrich Hölderlin’s late hymns Patmos (first version) and Mnemosyne (early draft) create an intriguing tension between the “solid letter” that must be deciphered faithfully and the evocation of a “sounding script” that, together with an equally enigmatic “echo”, refuses direct hermeneutic understanding. At [...] Read more.
Friedrich Hölderlin’s late hymns Patmos (first version) and Mnemosyne (early draft) create an intriguing tension between the “solid letter” that must be deciphered faithfully and the evocation of a “sounding script” that, together with an equally enigmatic “echo”, refuses direct hermeneutic understanding. At the point where the reader’s interpretive desire threatens to fail, musical settings like Peter Ruzicka’s MNEMOSYNE: Remembrance and Forgetting can be listened to as an attempt to actualize what Hölderlin’s original writing must leave unrealizable: the presence of real sound. In this audio-hermeneutic transfer, the act of listening opens up possibilities of the audible that are promised by the literary text without being actualized. The present essay interrogates this intermedial translatability between letter and sound by isolating a few selected passages from the facsimile reproduction of Hölderlin’s palimpsestic manuscript of multiple revisions, as provided by the Frankfurter Ausgabe. Mindful of the discontinuities and gaps in the original poems, my own analysis foregrounds its own fragmentary mode of reading Hölderlin’s poetry and listening to Ruzicka’s music. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hölderlin and Poetic Transport)
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