The Hölderliniae

by Nathaniel Tarn

The great German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s spirit infuses this gorgeous cycle of poems that sing of the loves and devastations of our times Each hymn in Nathaniel Tarn’s new collection The Hölderliniae is a love song to the Poet of Poets, Friedrich Hölderlin?― the German Romantic poet-philosopher who spent the last thirty-six years of his life sequestered in a carpenter’s tower in the south of Germany. Tarn speaks through Hölderlin and Hölderlin speaks through Tarn in an act of spiritual and lyric possession unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. The French Revolution―which Hölderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terror―illuminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall past tragedies. Line after line carries Hölderlin’s hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind’s disciplines and make a universe of its own.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published April 6, 2021

About the author

Nathaniel Tarn is an American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator.

Tarn was educated at Clifton College, UK and graduated in history and English from King's College, Cambridge. He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology at the Musée de l’Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France. A Fulbright a grant took him to Yale and the University of Chicago where Robert Redfield sent him to Guatemala for his doctoral fieldwork (1951-2) at the University of Chicago. He completed this work as a graduate student at the London School of Economics (1953-8).

Tarn was a professor at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at American universities.

Reviews

[Jack Donahue · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author Nathaniel Tarn not only pays homage to the great 18th century German poet Friedrich Holderlin but reveals through his own poetry the powerful influence Holderlin had on his own work. Holderlin followed in the tradition of other German Romantic poets such as Goethe and Schiller. He was a poet, philosopher and scholar, steeped in Greek mythology. Tragically, he succumbed to severe mental illness and lived in a tower on the Neckar River the last 36 years of his life, yet continued to write the most exquisite poetry. Tarn masterfully uses his own voice to explore the vast universe of the poetic mind, exploring it in depth.