ABSTRACT
F. HöLDERLIN’s poetry lacks Goethe’s breadth of vision, yet it soars to heights of dream which perhaps only Schiller and Shelley reached. Did not Hölderlin, Hyperion-like, himself become a myth—the light-bringer to whom Hellas was not a bleak idol of intellectual morality or cultural snobbery, but religion itself? In Diotima he beheld, as later, Stefan George in Maximin, the embodiment of the divine. As we shall note when referring to George, Hölderlin’s attitude to Greece has little in common with that of the modern poet. They are fundamentally different even in their first approach of Hellas. Hölderlin was drawn thither through Pindar, George through Greek sculpture. Above all the crystallized angularity of George’s verse is utterly remote from the mighty rhythmic flux of Hölderlin’s hymns. Nothing in literary history is perhaps so poignantly tragic as the suddenness with which Hölderlin’s genius sank into spiritual night.
