Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics)

Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843) is now recognized as one of Europe's supreme poets. Holderlin first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for Susette Gontard, the wife of a rich banker, to whose children he was tutor. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history from mythological times to the discovery of America and his own era. The 'Canticles of Night', by contrast, include enigmatic fragments in an unprecedented style, which anticipates the Symbolists and Surrealists. Throughout his career, he struggled desperately to reconcile his faith in the power of Nature, as embodied in the gods of ancient Greece, with conventional Christianity.