When I tell friends, even the most bookish friends, that I am in St Andrews at a seminar on the poet Hoelderlin, there is a blank look in their faces. He is a difficult poet, and , among those who do not read German, largely unread. As I now realise, unheard-of. Yet, consider this judgement by a very good German scholar, E.M. (Elsie) Butler - “Hoelderlin is probably the greatest poet even the German race, so prodigal of great poets, has produced”. (The phrase comes in a really magnificent book The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany published in 1935. Butler was Professor of German at Cambridge and the links she finds between the innocent Hellenism of Winckelmann, the “Classicism” of Schiller and Goethe, and the aesthetic and politics of the Third Reich is absolutely masterly. (Needless to say her book was banned in Hitler’s Germany).
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