ABSTRACT

Dr. L. S. Salzberger's spiritual forbears were Vida, Tasso, Ronsard and Sidney, as well as Milton and Klopstock. The advocacy of French classicismas the chief exemplar for German writers was effectively opposed from three directions. There are of classical antiquity, that of bardic or folk poetry and that of modern English literature. To enter into the peculiarities of Swabian theology, or Holderlin's possible debt to the millenarian and mystical doctrines of Bengel or Oetinger would be to plunge into the gulf with little hope of ever emerging; but even here certain interesting genealogical convergences and divergences with Milton might well be revealed. Holderlin's brief poetic career was a perpetual crisis, a perpetual revision of the premisses and functions of the sacer vates. The philosophic idealism of Holderlin's time was an attempt to meet the challenge of a frequently atheistic rationalism, and meet it on its own ground.