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The Genius of Hlderlin Hlderlin: Poems by Michael Hamburger; Hlderlin: A Critical Study by L. S. Salzberger Review by: R. W. Flint The Hudson Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1953), pp. 308-313 Published by: The Hudson Review, Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3847546 . Accessed: 08/01/2014 10:06
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R. W. FLINT

The Genius of Holderlin

HOLDERLIN: POEMS, translated with a critical introduction by Michael Hamburger. Pantheon. $3.50. HOLDERLIN: A Critical Study by L. S. Salzberger. Yale University Press. $3.50.

ERE ARE THE FIRST LONG STUDIES of Holderlin published in this country. New Directions has put out some translations by Prokosch, and there is an English edition of selected poems translated by J. B. Leishman, Rilke's translator. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that except for the departments of German and a few of humanities, one of the half-dozen best German poets and one of the two most seminal poets of the German 19th century renaissance is still unknown in America. Except for Heine and Rilke, German poetry was largely ignored by the best translators of the last generation, and Holderlin is a poet whose small but poignant quality consists in a particularly pure, direct relationship to the language as such. As a mind, he was well read and strictly trained, but as a poet he entirely lacked that wit and/or urbanity which made Goethe, Heine, George and Rilke more readily accessible to foreigners. Even in Germany his emergence as a recognized master was slow and somewhat undercover because of his failure to win the patronage of Goethe, a poet who recognized no rivals in Germany and is only now beginning to be treated with anything like candor. He also lacked the clear international standing which put Heine out of Goethe's reach. It was Schiller whom Goethe patronized; Holderlin, who started by imitating Schiller and eventually surpassed him, had to wait nearly a century for recognition. But the mystery behind this goes deeper than personal rivalry. Hilderlin could never have matched Goethe in the way Bach, for example, matched Handel. Though they were contemporaries (Holderlin was born in the same year as Wordsworth and Beethoven), he stands to Goethe as Leopardi to Dante or Keats to Shakespeare, as a poet who spoke from the center of his culture with a perfect mastery of his own tongue but whose range, in comparison to the greater poet, is very much narrower. Nothing in Goethe surpasses the best of Holderlin, though his total achievement is richer. In himself, in terms of tone and stance, Hilderlin most resembles Wordsworth, and it is here, in the great difference between the Wordsworthian lyric and prophetic mode and Goethe's special mixture of deliberate worldliness and naYvete, that the mystery lies. As men-of-the-world, Goethe and Heine have more in common with each other than either of them with Holderlin, who was never known to have joked until he went mad.

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Goethe was the first and last modern German poet whose poetry was temperedby a sophisticatedexperienceof the moresof power, who was himself a dilettante statesmanin the 18th century tradition. He once remarkedthat he had had nothing to do with "die Philosophieim eigentlichenSinn". However true that may be (in so devoted a reader of Spinoza) it seems to have been a necessarypose, as the last traces of Christianfeudalismdisappeared from and left behind a national cult of He was Germany relatively philosophy. untouched by the Lutheran anti-Roman indifferenceto power. Holderin, on the other hand, had Lutheranparents, a pietist mother, and was educated at Tiibingen in an atmospherewhich mixed old-fashionedpietism and enthusiasm for the Classics in about equal measure. Out of this semi-ruralatmosphere the philosophicalawakening developed. Holderlin had a good head for both philosophy and classical literature, for both enthusiasm and elegiac feeling; what he lacked at the outset and had to acquireby consciouseffort was simply the personalstanding on which to establishhis poetry. Like Wordsworth,he spoke for the middle class that had not yet lost its sympathy for the pieties of the countryside,but being middle class, and without Goethe'sprideof family or Heine's mixture of racial strains,he could neither play with folkish naivete nor speak directly for the "folk" (in so far as such a thing still existed). His feeling had to release itself in elegy and visionary prophecy, supported by philosophybut never, at his best, vitiated by it. H6lderlin's last thirty-six years were spent in a state of what has been diagnosedby Jung and others as schizophrenia,a pathetic but rather publicly picturesqueinsanity that attracted many visitors, to each of whom, addressing him as "Your Majesty", "Your Royal Highness", or "Your Holiness", (his or "Scaliger only concessionto medievalism) and signing himself "Scardanelli" Rosa",he would give, with great courtesy, sometimesincoherentand sometimes poignant short lyrics in his best elegiac vein. (Most of these have been lost, but one at least, "Der Herbst", is very fine.) His critics agree that the remarkablething about this insanity was the special sense in which it was a sacrificialfulfillment of his poetic character,no mere parableof the hard luck of poets, nor another example of the self-conscious poete maudit, but the inevitable result of his attempt to reconcile what was strongest in the mind of his time with what was most tragic in its experience. He became, in fact, a living example of Kant's dialectic without Kant's faith in science and categorical morality, and of Hegel's phenomenology of mind without Hegel's escapeinto a mechanicaltheory of history. Whether or not he really had to go mad is a question which invites sentimentality on both sides. It can be said with assurance,however, that no poet in a society which had so little use for the poet as an institution ever set his sights higher. Unlike Coleridge's,his loyalty was never seriouslydivided; he never confused poetry and philosophy. This in spite of the fact, as Mr. Hamburgerclaims on grounds I am unable

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to judge, that he was "certainly the equal" of Hegel and Schelling as a technical philosopher. In other words, he wholly lacked, as a thinker, that superstitious sense of the value of philosophy per se which we sometimes, forgetting such genuine cases as Lucretius, Dante or T. S. Eliot, grudgingly recognize in calling a man a "philosophical poet". At the same time, he was wholly involved in the post-Napoleonic awakening. One of his early friends described a meeting of the Tiibingen poetry club: "We were well supplied with Rhine wine, and we sang our way through all the Songs of Joy in succession. Schiller's Song of Joy we had reserved for the punch-bowl. . . . The bowl stood steaming on the table and we were about to begin the song when Holderlin begged us first to cleanse ourselves of our sins in the Castalian Spring. . . . We made our way through the garden and washed our faces and hands. 'This song of Schiller's', said Holderlin, 'no one impure may sing!' Now we sang. At the stanza, 'This glass to the Good Spirit', tears came into Holderlin's eyes; full of enthusiasm he held his glass out of the window and roared, 'This glass to the Good Spirit' into the open air, so that the whole Neckar valley re-echoed." How was this cult of joy given poetic color and movement? First of all, surprisingly perhaps but also inevitably for a poet with Holderlin's capacity for suffering, as elegy.

Wie mein Gliik, ist mein Lied.-Willst du im Abendroth Froh dich baden? Hinweg ists, und der Erd' ist kalt, Und der Vogel der Nacht schwirrt Unbequem vor das Auge dir'.
This elegiac note is purest in his well-known "Hyperions Schiksaalslied", but it also colors those memorable early poems in Alcaics, "Abendphantasie", "An die Hofnung", "Der Abschied" (third version), "An die Parzen", "An Diotima" (Diotima was Holderlin's pseudonym for his single, intense and tragic love-affair, Susette Gontard, the wife of a banker whose children he tutored), and the grave, radiant "Menons Klage um Diotima" in hexameters. Rather than quote one of the long poems piecemeal, I will restrict myself to "An die Parzen", a poem which renders his quality as fully as anything he wrote.

Nur einen Sormmer g6nnt, ihr Gewaltigen! Und einen Herbst zu reifen Gesangemir, Dass williger mein Herz, vom siissen Spielegesattigt, dann mir sterbe!
lI give Mr. Hamburger's translations; the German version is given in Holderlin's Swabian dialect. From "Die Kiirze", the red summer's glow Like my joy is my song.-In Would you bathe and be gay? Gone it is, cold the earth, And the bird of the night whirs, Swoops down awkwardly to your eyes. This is one of Mr. Hamburger's least effective translations. It entirely misses the excitement of "schwirrt" followed by the expressive "unbequem"-uneasy, uncomfortable.

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Die Seele,der im Lebenihr gottlich Recht Nicht ward, sie ruht auch drunten in Orkus nicht; Doch ist mir einst das Heil'ge, das am Herzen mir liegt, das Gedicht, gelungen Willkommendann, o Stille der Schattenwelt! Zufrieden bin ich, wenn auch mein Saitenspiel Mich nicht hinabgleitet; einmal Lebt' ich wie Gltter, und mehr bedarfsnicht.2
Here is certainly (I am sure the pun in the last line was unintentional.) a new note and a new diction in German, not the folkish pathos of "Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen . . ." but the sweet-tempered gravity and tight fluency of Gluck's neo-classic operas, the interpenetration of classical form and a modern idiom you find in the best of Campion or Landor. It has more weight in the perspective of German poetry than Campion or Landor have in English. Mr. Hamburger suggests what is to me a weak analogy to the poetry of Chenier, Leconte de Lisle or Heredia. The French neo-classicists were only such by virtue of subject; the single line was still their principal unit of meaning. Holderlin provides a new way to listen to the German language. From here to the looser prophetic poems in hexameters and Pindarics is not as long a journey as it might seem. He had to steer his way between a static Schilleresque Schwirmerei on the one hand and over-abstraction on the other. "I lack facility more than strength, nuances more than ideas, manifoldly ordered sounds more than a keynote, shadows more than light . . ." he wrote to a friend. It was not that he grew more philosophical as he grew older, but that the tension implicit in his double allegiance to the Bible and the Classics became increasingly available to him as experience and hence as poetry. In his prophetic poetry he assumes that the two can be poetically reconciled, not in the Miltonic manner, but in terms of a set of arbitrary symbols which oddly resemble Kafka's avatars of divine power and grace. "Patmos" ts the most ambitious and successful of these poems, the most personal, most coherent,
2"To the Fates". Only one summer grant me, 0 mighty ones And but one autumn leave me for mellow song, So that my heart with its sweet playing Sated more willingly then may perish. The soul to which in life its appointed rights Were not vouchsafed in Orcus too cannot rest; Yet should what I deem holy, cherish More than all else, should my verse grow perfect, Most welcome then, 0 stillness of shades below! Content I shall be, though music of my strings Do not escort me down; for once I Lived as the gods live, and that suffices.

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most richly figured and best modulated. Like Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, it is strictly sui generis, the kind of poem that would be unimaginable unless it existed, impossible unless it were also very good. As for its idea-scheme, a simple diagram should help. CLASSICAL(gods, demi-gods, presences, etc.) '
>-

IDEAL

(immortality, salvation, etc.) -

JOHANINE-APOCALYPTIC (Christ, sairts, apostles, etc.)

1t

' REAL (the poet's experience, fate, etc.)

As I hope to have indicated, the traffic between symbol and idea is continuous and "contrapuntal". That is, Holderlin makes no simple equations between any two sets of his poetic counters, as, for example, between the ideal and the Biblical or the real and the Classic. His only certainty is that of the poem itself, its realized feeling and the prophetic conclusions it draws. Erich Pryzwara, the Catholic theologian, in his useful study of Holderlin's ideas (still untranslated) shows how his step-wise system of values, Greece, Germany, the West and Asia, culminates in a vision of Christ as "das Abendland in seinem letzten Geheimnis". This is Hopkins's Christ who "plays in ten thousand places . . .", the living principle of holiness suffering under God; He is also the last of the classical divine presences, as much a destroying fire as a reconciler, the Heraclean figure of Michelangelo's Last Judgment. "Wie Firsten ist Herkules, Gemeingut Bacchus, Christus aber ist das Ende." Heracles is prince, Bacchus is common welfare, but Christ is the end. Any critic might succumb to grandiosity in analyzing this really very sober, ingenuous and limited poet, and so end by offering the reader an irreproachably lifeless cultural monument, a shining knight of the Humanities. Like Wordsworth he doubtless now and then engages in an almost indecent traffic with the Right Attitudes. And, indeed, like neo-classicism in any form, of whatever century, whether it take Horace or Pindar as its model, he is only a phase, a formal experiment capable of great charm and great banality. If he had not been the most ingenuously German of poets who could make use of the folksong tradition and its accepted naivetes, not as folk-song but in his own way, he would have been a considerable bore. The worst one can say of his hymns and odes is that they sometimes fall into a "touching and artless piety" (Mr. Salzberger's words) that cannot engage us very deeply. But that such a poet could have been the rejuvenator of German diction, who made possible the lapidary richness of George and the long, free, varied line of the Duino Elegies, is the prime interest for the critic. Without his epithets, his feminine endings, his inversions, his fluency within the verse paragraph, his quantitative stretching and weighting of the line, and his precise

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ear, the work of his two great 20th century disciples would have been quite different. Mr. Hamburger's is the book I would turn to first. His critical introduction is thorough and seems generally sound (though he perpetuatesthe idea that Wordsworthactually did restrict his language to a popular idiom. H6lderlin had no sentimental theory of language, was more concerned with the divinehuman traffic, had less capacity for suggesting terror or surprise; but more important than these differences,I think, are their similaritiesof stance and tone). He provides nearly all the mature and worthwhile poems, and gives translationswhich are excellent as such without larger ambitionsof their own. Mr. Salzbergergives very little of the poetry and is mainly concerned with ideas. His book would merit higher praise and more careful notice were not Mr. Hamburger'sbetter. Both critics have the advantageof a deep sympathy with their subject and a sophisticatedsense of how the poetry transcendshis limitations as man and thinker.

NORTHROP FRYE

Art in a New Modulation

FEELING AND FORM, by SusanneK. Langer. Scribner's.$7.00.
'THIS BOOKIS DESCRIBEDon the title-page as "A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key." It will doubtless become, like its predecessor, something of a general favorite, as it continues to show that Mrs. Langer is a highly readable popularizer of philosophical ideas, especially the ideas of Cassirer, to whose memory the book is dedicated. The style assumes the privileges of a public character: it is breezy, good-humored, colloquial, and It is a refreshing change from the sort of occasionally swashbuckling. aesthetics that either begins, like old-fashioned ethics, with some highly provincial legislation about what art ought to do, and then goes on to smear the art that doesn't do it, or else, in struggling to reach some vast generalization about what art as a whole does do, passes over its infinite variety of moods and experiences. There are two opposed but equally indefensible views about the relation of art to reality. One is the vulgar conception of "imitation" as directly reproducing the outer world or an inner experience. According to this view painting is essentially representation, dancing the direct expression of what the dancer really feels, and so on. The other is the conception of art as make-believe or

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