Friedrich Hölderlin's only novel, Hyperion (1797-99), is a fictional epistolary autobiography that juxtaposes narration with critical reflection. Returning to Greece after German exile, following his part in the abortive uprising against the occupying Turks (1770), and his failure as both a lover and a revolutionary, Hyperion assumes a hermitic existence, during which he writes his letters. Confronting and commenting on his own past, with all its joy and grief, the narrator undergoes a transformation that culminates in the realisation of his true vocation. Though Hölderlin is now established as a great lyric poet, recognition of his novel as a supreme achievement of European Romanticism has been belated in the Anglophone world. Incorporating the aesthetic evangelism that is a characteristic feature of the age, Hyperion preaches a message of redemption through beauty. The resolution of the contradictions and antinomies raised in the novel is found in the act of articulation itself. To a degree remarkable in a prose work of any length, what it means is inseparable from how it means. In this skilful translation, Gaskill conveys the beautiful music and rhythms of Hölderlin's language to an English-speaking reader.

Hölderlin's essays and letters constitute essential documents for an understanding of the transitional period from neo-classical poetics to what can only be characterized as a unique and, in its frequently experimental structure, essentially modernist poetics. This book contains virtually all of Hölderlin's theoretical writings translated for the first time. In spite of the great significance of Hölderlin''s ideas for contemporary critical thought, most of his highly important theoretical oeuvre has been unavailable to English readers until now. Here also are a number of letters which chart the development of Hölderlin's thought on issues that today remain fundamental to poetics and philosophy. The work's critical introduction discusses both the historical genesis of Hölderlin's theoretical writings out of the enlightenment as well as their systematic interaction with post-Kantian Idealism. Through interpretations of three short fragments, Pfau indicates that it would be insufficient to consider Hölderlin as the mere precursor of the great systematic philosophers of German Idealism--Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Instead, Hölderlin's earliest theoretical fragments already mark a turn away from the rigorous systematicity that underlies the philosophical discourse of his contemporaries. Hölderlin's theoretical writings may be the most seminal texts in the widely discussed interimplication of Idealistic philosophy and Romantic poetry and poetics.

One of Germany's greatest poets, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was also a prose writer of intense feeling, intelligence and perception. This new translation of selected letters and essays traces the life and thoughts of this extraordinary writer. Hölderlin's letters to friends and fellow writers such as Hegel, Schiller and Goethe describe his development as a poet, while those written to his family speak with great passion of his beliefs and aspirations, as well as revealing money worries and, finally, the tragic unravelling of his sanity. These works examine Hölderlin's great preoccupations - the unity of existence, the relationship between art and nature and, above all, the spirit of the writer.

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the German by James Mitchell. Readers of these carefully crafted translations by James Mitchell will profit not only by their economy and clarity of expression, but also by the fact that the same translating technique allows Hölderlin's imagery and remarkable spiritual imagination to shine forth in English. Friedrich Hölderlin was born in Germany in 1770 and studied in Tübingen from 1788 to 1793, where he became friends with fellow students Hegel and Schelling. Thereafter he wrote some of the most fascinating lyric poetry in the history of German literature. Translator James Mitchell has lived and worked for many years in Germany and San Francisco as a writer, book publisher and college teacher. This second edition provides the original texts in German.

Powerful new translations of this seminal figure in modern poetry

In this book, literary critic and political theorist Werner Hamacher shows how Hölderlin's late poetry develops and enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique, unprecedented, and still revolutionary concept of revolution that begins with a groundbreaking understanding of language.