Biography Essay

Denied recognition during his lifetime, Friedrich Holderlin has come to be regarded as a central figure of the German Classical-Romantic period. Despite his achievements in the fields of the novel, drama, and poetic theory, and despite the important influence he exerted on the development of the philosophy of German Idealism, he is best known for his lyric poetry. Holderlin's verse represents both the culmination of the German classical tradition, with its thematic and formal indebtedness to the literature of antiquity, and the highest expression of the German Romantic glorification of the poet, combining veneration of nature with the development of a national poetic ideal.

Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin was born in Lauffen, near Nurtingen, in Swabia, to Heinrich Friedrich Holderlin and Johanna Christiana Heyn Holderlin on 20 March 1770. His father died in 1772, and his mother remarried in 1774; her second husband, Johann Christoph Gock, Mayor of Nurtingen, died...