Given the 3 previous background posts, I’ll now go ahead with Hölderlin as the main focus, particularly here in Part 1 with his “Germania.”

We are looking at Hölderlin’s poetry as a clue to understanding the ancient Greeks in a new way.  Hölderlin spoke of the departure of the gods.  As I noted previously, Roberto Calasso says:

Yet there was a time when the gods were not just a literary clich?, but an event, a sudden apparition, an encounter with bandits perhaps, or the sighting of a ship. And it didn’t even have to be a vision of the whole. Ajax Oileus recognized Poseidon disguised as Calchas from his gait. He saw him walking from behind and knew it was Poseidon “from his feet, his legs.”  Since for us everything begins with Homer, we can ask ourselves: which words did he use for such events? By the time the Trojan War broke out, the gods were already coming to earth less frequently than in an earlier age. Only a generation before, Zeus had fathered Sarpedon on a mortal woman. All the gods had turned up for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. But now Zeus no longer showed himself to men; he sent other Olympians along to do his exploring for him: Hermes, Athena, Apollo. And it was getting harder to see them. Odysseus admits as much to Athena: “Arduous it is, oh goddess, to recognize you, even for one who knows much.” The Hymn to Demeter offers the plainest comment: “Difficult are the gods for men to see.” Every primordial age is one in which it is said that the gods have almost disappeared. Only to the select few, chosen by divine will, do they show themselves: “The gods do not appear to everyone in all their fullness [enargeis],” the Odyssey tells us. Enargei?s is the terminus technicus for divine epiphany: an adjective that contains the dazzle of “white,” argos, but which ultimately comes to designate a pure and unquestionable “conspicuousness.” It’s the kind of “conspicuousness” that will later be inherited by poetry, thus becoming perhaps the characteristic that distinguishes poetry from every other form.  But how does a god make himself manifest? In the Greek language the word theos, “god,” has no vocative case, observed the illustrious linguist Jakob Wackernagel. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful example of this in Euripides’ Helen: “O theoi. theos gar kai to gigno’ skein philous”–“O gods: recognizing the beloved is god.” Kerenyi thought that the distinguishing quality of the Greek world was this habit of “saying of an event: ‘It is theos.'” And an event referred to as being the?s could easily become Zeus, the most vast and all-inclusive of gods, the god who is the background noise of the divine. So when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.”  “Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. And we also hear a great familiarity, almost a recklessness, in the way the divine is mentioned, as though to encounter divinity was hardly unusual, but rather something that could be expected, or provoked. The word atheos, on the other hand, was only rarely used to refer to those who didn’t believe in the gods. More often it meant to be abandoned by the gods, meant that they had chosen to withdraw from all commerce with men. Aratus was writing in the third century b.c., but what became of this experience that for him was so obvious and all-pervasive in the centuries that followed? How did time affect it? Did it dissolve it, destroy it, alter and empty it beyond recognition? Or is it something that still reaches out to us, whole and unscathed? And if so, where, how?

Poetry is usually considered a kind of distraction from ourselves.  Heidegger notes:

the entire character of poetry; it was regarded as play, because it appears in the modest guise of play, and thus, consequentially enough, no other effect could arise from it than that of play, namely, distraction—almost the very opposite of the effect that it has when it is present in its true nature. For then the human being gathers himself in its presence, and the poetry bestows a sense of repose—not some empty repose, but that living, vital repose in which all our forces are at work, and yet we do not take cognizance of them as active, simply on account of their intimate harmony. Poetry brings humans closer and brings them together, not like play, in which they are united only by each forgetting himself, so that the living peculiarity of no one comes to the fore.  Poetry [Dichtung] is not play, and our relationship to it is not one of playful relaxation that makes us forget ourselves, but rather the awakening and delineation of an individual’s ownmost essence, through which he reaches back into the ground of his Dasein. If each individual proceeds from there, then a true gathering of individuals into an original community has already occurred in advance.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (pp. 33-34). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Starting with Holderlin’s poem “Germania,” Heidegger says poetry is rather a lucid seriousness given the enormity of the task.  It has the potential to redefine who we are and what it means to be that people:  Heidegger notes “Perhaps the German youth will one day come to remember the creator of their Hölderlin edition, Norbert von Hellingrath, who, at the age of twenty-eight, was killed in action at Verdun in 1916. (35).”  This reflects the ancient Greek polis culture where there was no difference between the person and the city-state. 

Hölderlin’s Germania talks about the gods who have fled, and that No longer does the holy host of humans divine Tarry in the blue of the heavens.  For example, the event of the blueing of the sky after the storm shows what the sky is always blueing in a inconspicuous, subtle manner, we just don’t notice it because we think of the sky in terms of subject (sky) and predicate (blue) wherein the movement/appearing is forgotten.  Similarly, when I turn down the unknown street looking for the yellow house, when I see it the yellowness leaps out at me. Again, this is hidden in “The house is yellow.” We see this kind of placing in boxes with how we divide poems into content and form:

It has long been the custom with regard to a poem, as with artworks in general and in other domains too, to distinguish between ‘content’ and ‘form.’ The distinction is hackneyed, and can be used for anything and everything. It gives the appearance of being an absolute, supratemporal determination, and yet it is entirely Greek, coming solely from Greek existence, and is therefore worthy of question, even if one were to say that something so ingrained and taken for granted can no longer be undone. Along the lines of this content–form distinction one can initially find an accommodating schema in analyzing the poem. The content is relatively simple and easy to identify: The old gods are dead, new ones are emerging. Germania has a special mission with regard to their arrival.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 46). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

The basic content of the poem is heralding the arrival of the new gods.  Holderlin said in a letter to his brother:

I thank you a thousand times over for your encouraging remarks on my little poems, and for many another friendly and fortifying word in your letter. We must stick firmly together in all our need and in our spirit… we wish only to struggle using all our strengths and to observe with full acuity and tenderness how we bring all that is human in us and in others into an ever freer and more intimate connection,

And to his friend Neuffer:

This epoch has cast such a heavy burden of impressions upon us that it is only, as I feel increasingly each day, through an extended period of activity that continues into old age, and through serious endeavors undertaken ever anew, that we may perhaps in the end be capable of producing that which nature in the first place gave us as our vocation, (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 49). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Poetry is what Nature gives us as our vocation:

Thus, we have to overcome the poem regarded as a piece of text that merely lies present before us. The poem must transform itself and become manifest as poetry. It is indeed in keeping with a habitual, everyday attitude toward the poem that we pull it out during dull and empty hours, for instance, as a fleeting form of spiritual aid, only to then put it away again. Or that we take up poems as something lying present before us, dissecting and explaining them, while others occupy themselves with medieval papal documents, still others with the Civil Code, and others with guinea pigs and earthworms. Each time it is we who dispose over the poem as we will. But our task is the contrary: The poetry is to prevail over us, so that our Dasein becomes the living bearer of the power of this poetry. (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 50). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

We are entangled in everydayness and so are expelled from the place where Art powerfully unfolds.  In Hölderlin’s Hyperion 2-186 Hölderlin notes “the first child of divine beauty is art. Thus it was with the Athenians.”  Recall when we thought of the idea of beauty co-appeared with beings (Now that is Art!  Now that is Nature!).  the Beauty of Being was what compelled thinkers to it, like the beauty of the idea of justice.  Holderlin says:

From mere intellect no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than just the limited cognition of what is present before us.  From mere reason no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than the blind challenge of a never-ending progression in unifying and differentiating a possible subject matter. But if the divine εν διαφερον εαυτω lights up, the ideal of beauty that belongs to the striving of reason, then it does not challenge blindly, but knows why and wherefore it makes its claim.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 52). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Our usual and everyday disposition is what prevents us from poetry:

The struggle for the poetry in the poem is the struggle with ourselves, insofar as in the everydayness of Dasein we are expelled from the poetry, cast blind, lame, and deaf upon the shore, and neither see nor hear nor sense the surge of the waves in the sea. The struggle with ourselves, however, in no way means inspecting ourselves and dissecting our soul through some form of curiosity; nor does it mean some sort of remorseful ‘moral’ rebuke; this struggle with ourselves, rather, is a working our way through the poem. For the poem, after all, is not meant to disappear in the sense that we would think up a so-called spiritual content and meaning for the poem, bring it together into some ‘abstract’ truth, and in so doing cast aside the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word. To the contrary: The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling of the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement—something that we have, as it were, in the same way that an automobile has its horn. It is not we who have language; rather, language has us, in a certain way. Everyday things become worn out, blunted, used up, and empty through their being in use. Hölderlin’s poems become more inexhaustible, greater, stranger from year to year—and can nowhere find definitive classification.  Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 54). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.

Just as the question of the to-be-thought implicates the being of the thinker, the poem also implicates the being of the poet.  The two are intimately related.  In the letter to the letter to his friend Böhlendorff of December 4, 1801,  Hölderlin suggests the poet rejoices at “a new truth, [which is] a better view of that which lies over and around us.”  Holderlin asks what does the poet do?  “The poet harnesses the lightning flashes of the God, compelling them into the word, and places this lightning-charged word into the language of his people. (62)”   Heidegger thus contends:

 Thunderstorms and lightning are the language of the gods, and the poet is the one who has to endure this language without shirking, to take hold of it, and to place it into the Dasein of the people… Poetizing is a passing on of these beckonings to the people, or, from the perspective of a people, poetizing means placing the Dasein of the people into the realm of these beckonings, that is, a showing, a pointing in which the gods become manifest, not as something referred to or observable, but in their beckoning…What we call the real in our everyday life is, in the end, what is unreal… And yet—consider this poetizing and this Dasein of a poet if we measure it against the ready-made standards of the everyday with its demands and pretentions, its strife and quarrels, its harshness and impatience, its half measures and calculations, without all of which it could never be what it has to be. What is poetizing compared to this! Hölderlin knew, and names it “this most innocent of all occupations” in a letter to his mother.  (Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 64). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.)

We see as we did with philosophers that poets are going to see life in a more penetrating way than has been done previously, and everyday life and opinion is going to cover up life’s true nature.  I gave the example of the boy who is too near to a romantic relationship to be able to see that it’s toxic. Next time I’ll continue with Hölderlin’s “Germania.”