A Friedrich Hölderlin, German author, straddling the centuries XVIII and XIX, is considered the greatest poet of German Romanticism. He was also a novelist and playwright, as well as contemporary of names as illustrious as Hegel or Schiller, perhaps the best known of that period. Hölderlin he died a day like us de 1843 after many years living in seclusion, the victim of a schizophrenia That did not stop him from writing and creating. To remember or discover it, I select a series of phrases and poems of his work and his letters.
Friedrich Hölderlin
I was going for the priesthood, in fact, it ended Theology, but never exercised and in 1793 published his first poems thanks to Friedrich Schiller, what was your friend and patrons. His fascination through the ancient world of Greece and Rome marked it in his work. It was very prolific, despite suffering a schizophrenia which appeared to him at the beginning of the XNUMXth century and which seclusion until his death.
Su best known work it's a novel, Hyperion, but he cultivated the drama in The death of Empedocles, and especially poetry with various hymns, odes and elegies: Poems to Diotima (inspired by his lover Susette Gontard) or the collection of poems Hope. Its also preserved correspondence.
Phrases
- The fullness of the infinitely living world nourishes and satiates my destitute being with intoxication.
- Let each one be as he really is. Let no one speak or act contrary to how you think and how your heart feels.
- Remember our undisturbed hours when we were just next to each other? This was triumph! Both so free and proud and dazzling in soul, heart, eyes and face, and both in that heavenly peace, side by side!
- Man must express himself, do something good to deserve, carry out good actions, but man must not act only on reality, but also on the soul ”.
- How close the man in his youth thinks that the goal is! This is the most beautiful of all the illusions with which nature helps the weakness of our being.
- There is a forgetfulness of all existence, a silence of our being, which is as if we had found everything.
- What would life be without hope? A spark that jumps out of the coal and is extinguished, or like when a gust of wind is heard in the unpleasant station that whistles for a moment and then calms down, would that be us?
poems
Hyperion's Song of Fate
You wander up in the light
on soft ground, happy geniuses!
God's breezes, radiant,
soft touch you
like the artist's fingers
the holy strings.
Without fate, like infants
who sleep, breathe the gods;
glow
in chaste cocoon kept
their spirits
eternally.
And in his blessed eyes
shines quiet
perpetual glow.
But it is not given to us
pose somewhere.
They waver and fall
the suffering men,
blind, one
time in the other,
like rock waters
on rock thrown,
Eternally, towards the uncertain.
Life ages
Oh, cities of the Euphrates!
Oh, streets of Palmyra!
Oh, forests of columns on the weeping desert!
What are you?
Of your crowns,
having crossed the limits
of those who breathe,
by the smoke of the gods
and its fire you were deprived;
but sitting now under clouds (every
which resting in its own stillness)
under hospitable oaks, in
the shady where the roe deer graze,
strange they make me dead
the happy souls.
Greece
So much is man worth and so much is the splendor of life,
Men are often masters of nature,
For them the beautiful land is not hidden,
But with sweetness she undresses morning and evening.
The open fields are like the days of harvest,
Around the old Legend spreads spiritual,
A new life always returns to our humanity,
And the year bows still once silently.
Sources: Blog The flight of the owl