Poetology as Symptom in Friedrich Hölderlin

I argue that Friedrich Hölderlin's theoretical texts are marked by a paradox: namely, Hölderlin attempts to achieve in them the work of unification he assigns to poetry alone. This unification is his specifically post‐Kantian response to a more general worry about the linking of mind and world. Hölderlin understands that the desire for unification within and between human subjects and the external world is a fundamental anthropological tendency even as the desire remains unfulfillable. I draw out thematic and metatextual features of Hölderlin's theoretical texts that show him making a strong distinction between poetic and theoretical language; engaging with problems of the connection between mind and world; and, finally, attempting to perform the unifications he denies discursive language in the theoretical texts themselves. I close the article with a reading of the late poem “Lebensalter” to show that, for Hölderlin, poetry can effect unifications that theory cannot.