ABSTRACT

Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin's work is a striving for classical clarity, and he is 'Romantic' in so far as his poetry is a recognition that such clarity was no longer compatible with truthfulness of utterance. He, and Novalis, might help attune therapists to the importance of the particular word spoken – this word, not that – and to the fact that the word is always contingent and inadequate. The German Romantics were intensely aware that the word was never to be taken for granted. The poem was written towards the end of the Sturm und Drang period, within which Romanticism, in German-speaking Europe, found some of its roots. Michael Hamburger writes of the 'reticence and impersonality' of Holderlin's poems, which was based on the poet's own sense of the limitations of his scope and vision; he subjected himself to a severe discipline of the imagination.