Essays and Letters

Description

'I want to live for the art that is my heart's desire' One of Germany's greatest poets, Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770 - 1843) also wrote prose of intense feeling, intelligence and perception. This new translation of his complete essays and selected letters traces the life and thoughts of this extraordinary writer. Hoelderlin's letters to friends and contemporaries such as Hegel, Schelling and Schiller describe his development as a poet, and consider the purpose of poetry and philosophy, while others, including those to his family, speak compellingly of his beliefs and aspirations, revealing his passion for 'Diotima' and, finally, the unravelling of his sanity. The essays and prose fragments form a rare blend of the philosophic and poetic that examines Hoelderlin's great preoccupations - the unity of existence, the relationship between art and life, the nature of tragedy and, above all, the 'poetic spirit'. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth's introduction discusses the tone and style of Hoelderlin's prose and his key role in the German philosophical revolution of the 1790s. This edition also includes a chronology, suggested further reading, biographical notes on Hoelderlin's correspondents and notes. Translated with an introduction and notes by JEREMY DLER and CHARLIE LOUTH

Johann Christian Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770- 1843) was a major German lyric poet. His work bridges the Classical and Romantic schools. Hoelderlin was a solitary figure, and suffered bouts of mental illness throughout his life. Jeremy Adler is Emeritus Professor of German and Senior Research Fellow at King's College London. He is a sometime fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin, and a Corresponding Member of the German Academy of Language and Literature. He has written a book on Goethe's Elective Affinities (1987), produced a catalogue of visual poetry, Text als Figur (third edition, 1990), and edited the collected works of August Stramm (1990). With Richard Fardon he edited Franz Baermann Steiner's Selected Writings (1999), and also edited Steiner's collected poems (2000) and selected aphorisms (2009). His edition of Hoelderlin's Selected Poems and Fragments was published by Penguin (1998), as was his illustrated life of Franz Kafka (2001). Charlie Louth was born in 1969 in Bristol. He is a Fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford, where he lectures in German. He is the author of Hoelderlin and the Dynamics of Translation (1998).