Hölderlin's Silence
Description:... Hölderlin's fame rests as much on his long «madness» and the disconcerting silence that accompanied it as on his magnificent poetic legacy. Criticism has occasionally alluded to a connection between the evolution of the works and the genesis of the silence, though a thorough analysis of this connection has been wanting. Hölderlin's Silence seeks to fill this gap, leaving aside the ultimately moot question of madness. The author examines categories of the poet's character and experience, including mysticism, skepticism, Utopian idealism, and innate passivity, that appear to have propelled him away from language. The effect of these catalysts of silence is then traced through Hölderlin's entire oeuvre. This approach allows the «gathering strength of silence» to become manifest until, in the last fragments before the onset of the «benighting, » one sees this quintessential poet confronted with an overwhelming array of inducements to relinquish sovereign articulateness in favor of a Pyrrhonian imperturbability.
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