Hyperion

[This page by Susan Ranson]

The novel Hyperion (1797–99) illustrates both Hölderlin’s youthful gaze towards the ideals of calm, light, reason, harmony, unity, and his (and Hyperion’s) deep dissatisfaction with his own culture. It is couched in largiloquent, emotional prose and is not considered a major work, yet this poem from it is tender and measured until, in the last stanza, it expresses tragic human downfall. Untypically, in this poem there is some assonance. The poem’s rhythms bring Goethe’s ‘Gesang der Geister über den Wassern’ to mind, but its sharp polarity between depths and heights, what is and what could be, is in pointed contrast to Goethe’s serene images. Hölderlin was already aware of, and feared, his mental instability up to ten years before this.

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/hoelderl/hyperion/hyper406.html

Further Reading

Joshua Billings, ‘Hyperion’s symposium: an erotics of reception’, Classical Receptions Journal 2:1 (2010), 4-24

Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), Chapter 4: ‘Towards a Poetic Novel: Jean Paul and Hölderlin’, pp. 65-106

Howard Gaskill (trans.), Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Durham: University of Durham, 1984)

Howard Gaskill, ‘“So dacht’ ich. Nächstens mehr”: Translating Hölderlin’s Hyperion’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 77:2 (2008), 90-100

Georg Lukács, ‘Hölderlin’s Hyperion’ [1934], in Lukács, Goethe and his Age, trans. by Robert Anchor (London: Merlin, 1968), pp. 136-58

John B. Lyon, ‘“Was nemlich mehr sei, das Ganze oder das Einzelne”: Hölderlin’s Hyperion as an Unresolved Crisis’, German Life and Letters 51:1 (1998), 1-14

Web Link

https://annotext.dartmouth.edu/texts?language_id=10000

Hyperion (2. Bd., 2.Buch) in German; click on a word for the English translation