What does it mean to define a poem as “living” or “alive”? How, if at all, is it possible to capture life, the living element, in a poem? Is it not true that poetry, qua talis, is a “living language”, different from the “dead”...
moreWhat does it mean to define a poem as “living” or “alive”? How, if at all, is it possible to capture life, the living element, in a poem? Is it not true that poetry, qua talis, is a “living language”, different from the “dead” speculations of the intellect? Or is there maybe a kind of poetry that is “more alive” than others, in that it is able in itself and through its effects to represent life? At the turn into the Nineteenth century (1798-1800), Friedrich Hölderlin explored such issues, which were crucial to his own personal intellectual and poetic development. My volume examines Hölderlin's passionate search during the years 1798-1800, through an analysis of its forms, articulations, and outcomes in his works.
Hölderlin devotes to his search of the Lebendiges in der Poësie, the living element in poetry, some of his most important works, such as the project of the literary journal Iduna, the tragedy Der Tod des Empedokles and his various and complex poetological writings, including the fragment Über die Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes, which is possibly one of the masterpieces of poetology of the last two century.
He shares this interest in the concept of life and its manifold implications with many other contemporaneous thinkers. Together with Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Schiller and Sinclair, they form a tight Konstellation, where Hölderlin's role is that of experimenter and propelling force. The Introduction of my book (pp. 7-24) is devoted to the analysis of this Konstellation of thinkers and poets who attempt, between the end of the Eighteenth century and the beginning of the Nineteenth, to understand theoretically, to reproduce in poetry and to communicate effectively in their works and writings the concept of “life”.
The first chapter of the book (pp. 25-62) is devoted to the analysis of the project of the literary journal Iduna. Following the example of the successful journal “Die Horen”, edited by Friedrich Schiller in 1795-1797, Hölderlin invites in 1799 leading personalities of his epoch (philosophers, poets, thinkers, such as Friedrich and August Schlegel, Schelling, Schiller, Goethe) to contribute to his projected journal. As he writes in one of the Werbebriefe for Iduna, the journal was expected to be able to “put in circulation as effectively as possible the living soul of the humanity”, to put people in contact and strengthen social bonds. Although only few critical studies have examined in detail Hölderlin's project of Iduna, my book shows how important this project is in order to understand correctly the socio-political and “humanistic” aims that animate Hölderlin's poetic works. Among the short essays (written personally by Hölderlin) to be published in Iduna, there is an important text, entitled Über den Gesichtspunkt aus dem wir das Altertum anzusehen. In this text Hölderlin describes his theory of the origin and functioning of the arts: each work of art, in the past and today, originates from a single, “living” source, named Grund, which is in itself unattainable; from this Grund arise and to this Grund return all the Bildungtriebe and Kunsttriebe, that is the multiplicity of formative and artistic impulses that lead the artists in the productive process of their works. As Hölderlin writes in the essay, the necessary condition for the creation of a “living” work of art (a living poem; for instance: eine lebendige Dichtung) is that the artist follows his own pure formative impulse, avoiding any kind of imitation of ancient (already “formed”, therefore “dead”, “positive”) works of art. The principle of imitation of the Ancients is one of the highly debated topics at the end of Eighteenth century. Unfortunately (for a series of reasons that I describe in detail in the book) Iduna turned out to be a failure.
The second chapter of my book is devoted to the analysis of the three different versions of the dramatic pièce Der Tod des Empedokles, a project that absorbed Hölderlin for more than three years and was definitely abandoned in 1800. The three versions are incomplete; after writing the third one, Hölderlin attempted explicitly to give philosophical substance to his dramatic poem, writing a complex and highly theoretical text, entitled Grund zum Empedokles. In november 1798, while he was working on the second version of the drama, he wrote to his close friend Friedrich Neuffer: “Das Lebendige in der Poësie ist jezt dasjenige, was am meisten meine Gedanken und Sinne beschäfftiget. Ich fühle so tief, wie weit ich noch davon bin, es zu treffen, und dennoch ringt meine ganze Seele danach und es ergreift mich oft, daß ich weinen muß, wie ein Kind, wenn ich um und um fühle, wie meinen Darstellungen an einem und dem andern fehlt [...]” (Friedrich Hölderlin to Friedrich Neuffer, 12.11.1798). The question of the poetic representation (and representability) of the “living element” (das Lebendige) absorbs Hölderlin completely. Between 1798 and 1800 he was persuaded that the best form of representation for the living element was the tragedy. After three unsuccessful attempts to complete Der Tod des Empedokles, Hölderlin abandoned his dramatic project at the beginning of 1800.
The third chapter of my book is devoted to the analysis of a fragmentary text, named Wenn der Dichter einmal des Geistes mächtig ist... (also known as Über die Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes), that Hölderlin begun to compose immediately after abandoning the project of Der Tod des Empedokles, in 1800. As I show in detail in the book, the central problem that this fragment attempts to focus is, again, the poetic representation/representability of the “living element”. After the failure of Iduna and Der Tod des Empedokles, the fragment Wenn der Dichter einmal des Geistes mächtig ist... constitutes Hölderlin's renewed theoretical attempt to describe the difficulties involved in the poetic representation of the “living element”. It is a kind of phenomenology of the creative process, a description of the decisive steps that a poet has to complete in order to compose his poem. The main result of the vertiginous theoretical analysis developed in the fragment are the so-called “laws of the alternation of the poetic tones” (Wechsel der Töne), that, according to Hölderlin, were expected to allow definitely the representation of the “living element” in the poem. In other words, these laws were expected to make it possible to “capture” life, the living element, in the poem. As we know from Hölderlin's poetic works, the application of the theoretical laws of the “alternation of the tones” to the poems turned out to be, again, a failure.
My general claim in this book is that the specificity of Hölderlin's poetics and poetology is that his search for the Lebendiges in der Poësie ultimately acquires ambiguous tonalities. His increasingly bold experimentation with new and peculiar poetic forms and theoretical attempts to capture life is accompanied by an increasing corrosion of those same expressive forms. In his last poems, dedicated to the changing of seasons, the rugged elementariness of the bare poetic mono-tone weaves together life and death (pp. 162-164).
