All Roads Lead to Hölderlin

I need to find the time to update this blog to seriously sit down and explore Hölderlin‘s work. That includes both his poetry and his poetics. (At some point, too, I need to figure out how to actually type the umlaut-O, instead of just copying and pasting it.)

The most recent encounter with this poet was a search result that turned up when I, ahem, searched for baudrillard samarkand to learn where Baudrillard’s discussion of “Death at Samarkand” is located (it’s in Seduction):

“Baudrillard and Hölderlin and Poetic Resolution” by Gerry Coulter

Neat! I’m somewhat familiar with Dr. Coulter, as he’s rather prolific and is also the founder of the International Journal for Baudrillard Studies, for which he wrote the Ballard “obituary.”

Other recent encounters with Hölderlin include:

• finding out about the 2004 documentary The Ister, while trying to find out more about the so-called poetic turn in later Heidegger

• trying to prepare a paper on Nietzsche‘s The Birth of Tragedy while listening to the rather Oedipal “The Weeping Song” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song reminded me of Walter Benjamin‘s work on the Trauerspiel; that, in turn, led me to Benjamin’s earliest writings where Hölderlin plays an even bigger role than in the Habilitationsschrift

• teaching Siegfried Kracauer’s Weimar essays led me to the discovery that he ends his essay on the mass ornament with Hölderlin’s “For Zimmer”

• doing a search this time for poetry and philosophy in general (for my Poetics course), I came across Babette A. Babich’s Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger

• hitting the library and finding Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks (eds.)’s Philosophy and Tragedy, an anthology that devotes four essays to Hölderlin, twice more than Hegel or Nietzsche (Heidegger and Benjamin get only one apiece)