The Hoelderliniae

The thirty hymns of The Hoelderliniae are inspired by the intricacies and transcendent humanity of Beethoven’s last quartets. Nathaniel Tarn’s new book opens with a biographical note on the Poet of Poets, Friedrich Hoelderlin, setting the scene and introducing the doomed love of the poet’s life, Diotima; it ends in the Neckar River, the river of Hoelderlin’s birth and death. Through affairs of love and polity, Tarn speaks through Hoelderlin, and Hoelderlin speaks through Tarn. The French Revolution-which Hoelderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terror-illuminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall those past tragedies. Line after line carries Hoelderlin’s hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind’s disciplines and make a universe of its own.