Dromo's Den

[Up] [Dromo's Den]

Friedrich Hölderlin Biography

Friedrich Hölderlin Image

HÖLDERLIN, Johann Christoph Friedrich (1770-1843). A German poet, born at Lauffen and educated at Tübingen, where he knew Hegel and Schelling. He was an ardent admirer of Schiller, who secured him a tutorship in the house of his friend, Charlotte von Kalb (1793-94). Then he became tutor in a banker's family at Frankfort, where the mother of his young charges, Frau Gontard, inspired him with a Platonic passion, which led him to celebrate her under the name of Diotima in his Hyperion. But from this time on his mind began to fail, and, save for intervals of sanity, be never recovered. His style was classic; his thought in his best work, deep and full. He wrote: Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland, a novel in epistolary form, but really a prose poem (1797-99); an incomplete drama Empedokles; translations from Sophocles' Œdipus and Antigone (1804); and the Lyrische Gedichte, his best work, mostly elegiac in tone, edited by Uhland and Schwab (4th ed., 1878; in 1899, by Linke). A complete edition of his works, with his letters and biography by Schwab, appeared at Stuttgart (1846). Consult Scherer, F. Hölderlin, Vortrage (Leipzig, 1874); Müller-Rastatt, Hölderlin, sein Leben urn sein Dichten (Bremen, 1894); Milbrandt, Friedrich Hölderlin (Berlin, 1896).