Friedrich Hölderlin

Although he never achieved widespread recognition in his own lifetime, Friedrich Hölderlin is regarded today as a groundbreaking thinker and one of the most significant poetic voices of European modernity. He belonged to the fateful generation that came of age with the French Revolution: Beethoven, Wordsworth, Napoleon, and Hegel were all, like Hölderlin, born in 1770. Hölderlin's aspirations as a poet and thinker were to a great extent shaped by this event and its aftermath. While clinging to a vision of radical political, social and spiritual transformation, he struggled to come to terms with the belatedness and repeated failure of its realization. He sought in particular to define the role of poetry in the summoning of a new age and t