Book description
One of Germany's greatest poets, Johann Christian Friedrich H lderlin
(1770-1843) was also a prose writer of intense feeling, intelligence and
perception. This new translation of selected letters and essays traces
the life and thoughts of this extraordinary writer. H lderlin's letters
to friends and fellow writers such as Hegel, Schiller and Goethe
describe his development as a poet, while those written to his family
speak with great passion of his beliefs and aspirations, as well as
revealing money worries and, finally, the tragic unravelling of his
sanity. These works examine H lderlin's great preoccupations - the unity
of existence, the relationship between art and nature and, above all,
the spirit of the writer.
Johann Christian Friedrich H lderlin (1770- 1843) was a major
German lyric poet. His work bridges the Classical and Romantic
schools. H lderlin 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 H lderlin'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 H lderlin and the Dynamics of Translation (1998).
