ABSTRACT
Friedrich Schiller, who was at once a mentor and a model to avoid for Friedrich Hölderlin, counseled his protege in 1796 to 'flee philosophical subject matter'. The Deutscher Klassiker volume suffices for most German-reading poetry lovers, who must nonetheless pay some attention to all this philological squabbling about variants. Hoff highlights Hölderlin's influence, which he finely compares to 'the pull of a giant wayward star'. He mentions Nietzsche and Heidegger; the latter's Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry (1951) forged new ways of reading, not just Hölderlin but also and especially numerous twentieth-century poets similarly concerned with the ontological predicament movingly summed up in the seventh poem of 'Bread and Wine': But, friend, we come too late. Although no budding German writer can ignore Goethe, who maintained a condescending attitude toward the younger HöLderlin, it is the author of 'Patmos', the author's own favorite, who shines beyond the borders of German literature.
