That the poet should take refuge in Greek antiquity is not surprising, when we consider the conditions which prevailed at that time in the field of learning.  It was not many decades since the study of Latin and Roman institutions had been forced to yield preeminence of position in Germany to the study of Greek.  Furthermore, his own Suabia had come to be recognized as a leader in the study of Greek antiquity, and in his contemporaries Schiller, Hegel, Schelling, who were all countrymen and acquaintances of his, he found worthy competitors in this branch of learning.  His fondness for the language and literature of Greece goes back to his early school days, especially at Denkendorf and Maulbronn.  On leaving the latter school, he had the reputation among his fellow-students of being an excellent Hellenist, according to the report of Schwab, his biographer.  It was while there that Hoelderlin as a boy of seventeen first made use of the Alcaic measure in which he subsequently wrote so many of his poems.

A full discussion of the technic of Hoelderlin’s poems would have so remote a connection with the main topic under consideration that its introduction here would be entirely out of place.  It will suffice, therefore, merely to indicate along broad lines the extent to which the Greek idea took and held possession of the poet.

Out of his 168 shorter poems, 126, exactly three-fourths, are written in the unrhymed Greek measures.[53] Those forms which are native are confined almost entirely to his juvenile and youthful compositions, and after 1797 he only once employs the rhymed stanza, namely, in the poem “An Landauer."[54] As a boy of sixteen, he wrote verses in the Alcaic and Asclepiadeian measures,[55] and soon acquired a considerable mastery over them.  At seventeen he composed in the latter form his poem “An meine Freundinnen:” 

    In der Stille der Nacht denket an euch mein Lied,
    Wo mein ewiger Gram jeglichen Stundenschlag,
    Welcher naeher mich bringt dem
    Trauten Grabe, mit Dank begruesst.[56]

While not exhibiting the finish of expression and musical qualities of his more mature Alcaic lyrics, still it is not bad poetry for a boy of seventeen, and the reader feels what the boy was not slow to learn, that the stately movement of the Greek stanzas lends an added dignity to the expression of sorrow, which was to constitute so large a part of his poetic activity.  As already stated, the Alcaic measure was of all the Greek verse-forms Hoelderlin’s favorite, and the one most frequently and successfully employed by him.  He is very fond of introducing Germanic alliteration into these unrhymed stanzas, as the following example will illustrate: 

    Und wo sind Dichter, denen der Gott es gab,
    Wie unsern Alten, freundlich und fromm zu sein,
    Wo Weise, wie die unsern sind, die
    Kalten und Kuehnen, die unbestechbarn?[57]