1.1 Nonsense Paired with Pretension

WITH HÖLDERLIN, THE STRUGGLE for style remains singularly exposed. It is not just that so many of his writings remain unfinished, rarely attaining the gracious ease that would allow the reader to forget the author in the work. More important yet is that this struggle passes through, and indeed remains bound up with and caught up in, an extraordinary constellation of mostly fragmentary philosophical, political, and poetological meditations. If Hölderlin's poetry marks a rupture, a break with tradition, this break is, first of all, a matter of style.

His earliest reception gives evidence of this. While a few early pieces, seldom now ranked among his greatest, found some immediate success, mockery greeted the small selection of his poems, more representative of his mature style, that appeared in the Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1805, der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet (Pocketbook for 1805, Devoted to Love and Friendship). One reviewer would speak of Hölderlin's “recently versified ramblings [Radottagen]” (SW 11:23). Another proposed a generous prize “for the few mortals who can rightly boast of understanding the new poems of Hölderlin … and we would not exclude even the author himself from the competition.” “Nothing,” the reviewer adds, “arouses more displeasure than nonsense paired with pretension.” And even Carl Philipp Conz, a more sympathetic and sensitive reader, greeted the newer works with apprehension, preferring Hölderlin's earlier style. “For they are,” he notes, “sui generis and awaken entirely mixed feelings. They seem like sounds torn away from the disrupted, once-beautiful union of mind [Geist] and heart. Hence the language is ponderous, dark, often completely incomprehensible, and the rhythm is equally raw” (SW 11:30).

Yet the clearest evidence of this shift in poetic style is the very different fate of his Hyperion. In Hölderlin's own lifetime, even before he was committed to the care of Zimmer and became the “mad poet,” Hyperion not only was the main source of his reputation as a writer, but also had been largely well received by critics. Yet even though, with the revival of interest in Hölderlin at the beginning of the twentieth century, his novel is still regarded as an important part of his oeuvre and a considerable body of secondary literature has already been devoted to it, it is seldom ranked among the supreme accomplishments of the poet.