Selected Poems And Fragments (Penguin Classics)

Though his literary talents were scarcely known to his contemporaries, Friedrich Holderlin has emerged today as one of Europe's supreme poets. The ode he wrote when he was in love with Susette Gontard, the wife of a rich banker to whose children he was tutor, and his sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history are as extraordinary as the visionary lyrics of Blake and Yeats. The style of his other poems anticipates the symbolists and the surrealists. This superb bilingual selection exhibits Holderlin's prodigious gifts and his desperate struggle to reconcile his faith in Hellenism with Christianity. 352 pages.