Editing Friedrich Hölderlin (section)

==Works==
The poetry of Hölderlin, widely recognized today as one of the highest points of [[German literature]], was little known or understood during his lifetime, and slipped into obscurity shortly after his death; his illness and reclusion made him fade from his contemporaries' consciousness—and, even though selections of his work were published by his friends during his lifetime, it was largely ignored for the rest of the 19th century.

[[File:Ermunterung001.jpg|thumb|250px|Hölderlin's [[autograph]] of the first three stanzas of his [[ode]] "Ermunterung" ("Exhortation")]]
Like Goethe and Schiller, his older contemporaries, Hölderlin was a fervent admirer of ancient Greek culture, but for him the [[Greek mythology|Greek gods]] were not the plaster figures of conventional classicism, but wonderfully life-giving actual presences, yet at the same time terrifying. Much later, [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] would recognize Hölderlin as the poet who first acknowledged the [[Orphism (religion)|Orphic]] and [[Dionysian Mysteries|Dionysian]] Greece of the [[Greco-Roman mysteries|mysteries]], which he would fuse with the [[Pietism]] of his native [[Swabia]] in a highly original religious experience.<ref name="Josephson-Storm">{{Cite book | last = Josephson-Storm | first = Jason | title = The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences | location = Chicago | publisher = University of Chicago Press | date = 2017 |page = 88 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=xZ5yDgAAQBAJ | isbn = 978-0-226-40336-6 }}</ref> Hölderlin developed an early idea of [[Social cycle theory|cyclical history]] and therefore believed political radicalism and an aesthetic interest in [[Classical antiquity|antiquity]], and, in parallel, Christianity and [[Paganism]] should be fused.<ref name="Josephson-Storm" /> He understood and sympathised with the Greek idea of the [[Tragedy|tragic fall]], which he expressed movingly in the last stanza of his "Hyperions Schicksalslied" ("Hyperion's Song of Destiny").

In the great poems of his maturity, Hölderlin would generally adopt a large-scale, expansive and unrhymed style. Together with these long hymns, odes and elegies—which included "Der Archipelagus" ("The Archipelago"), "Brod und Wein" ("Bread and Wine") and "Patmos"—he also cultivated a crisper, more concise manner in epigrams and couplets, and in short poems like the famous "Hälfte des Lebens" ("The Middle of Life").

In the years after his return from Bordeaux, he completed some of his greatest poems but also, once they were finished, returned to them repeatedly, creating new and stranger versions sometimes in several layers on the same manuscript, which makes the editing of his works troublesome. Some of these later versions (and some later poems) are fragmentary, but they have astonishing intensity. He seems sometimes also to have considered the fragments, even with unfinished lines and incomplete sentence-structure, to be poems in themselves. This obsessive revising and his stand-alone fragments were once considered evidence of his mental disorder, but they were to prove very influential on later poets such as [[Paul Celan]]. In his years of madness, Hölderlin would occasionally pencil ingenuous rhymed [[quatrain]]s, sometimes of a childlike beauty, which he would sign with fantastic names (most often "Scardanelli") and give fictitious dates from previous or future centuries.