Selected Last Poems

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The twenty-eight poems by Friedrich Hoelderlin presented here were most probably written during the last eleven years of his life from 1832 to 1843, after his bout of "madness". They present the following characteristics: their prosody is in iambic pentameters or hexameters, with feminine rhymes, their subject matter is impersonal contemplation. The importance in these poems of rhythm, and of sound more generally, brings to mind Hoelderlin's words, as reported by Bettina Von Arnim: "The laws of the mind are rhythmical. (...) As long as the poet is still looking for the metrical accent and is not carried forward by the rhythm, his poetry is without truth (...) what is poetry is the fact that the mind can only express itself in rhythms, that its language is rhythm". The goal of the translator has been to make this music "heard" as much as possible.