Abstract
In this chapter I argue that we can best read an enigmatic scene of erotic encounter from Hölderlin’s Hyperion through comparison with a paradigm of aesthetic production outlined by Schelling at the end of System of Transc endental Idealism. In a sense, Hyperion constructs his lover, Diotima, as an aesthetic object. We thus find in the scene an erotic variation of Schelling’s concept of the transformation of “intellectual intuition” into “aesthetic intuition .” I compare this scene from Hyperion with Percy Shelley’s Epipsychidion (1821), a poem that likewise includes a mysterious erotic encounter on a Greek island. The comparison allows us to read an erotically charged version of intellectual intuition within Shelley’s poem as well.
“From my earliest youth on I preferred to live, more than anywhere else, on the coasts of Ionia and Attica, as well as on the beautiful islands of the Archipelago, and among my fondest dreams was the hope of actually journeying there one day, to the sacred tomb of mankind’s youth.”
[Von früher Jugend an lebt’ ich lieber, als sonstwo, auf den Küsten von Jonien und Attika und den schönen Inseln des Archipelagus, und es gehörte unter meine liebsten Träume, einmal wirklich dahin zu wandern, zum heiligen Grabe der jugendlichen Menschheit.]
—Hölderlin, Preface to the Penultimate version of Hyperion
From Hölderlin’s “Introduction to the Penultimate Version” of Hyperion. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 8 vols. (in 15), (Stuttgart: Cotta; W. Kohlhammer, 1943–1985), 3:235.
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Notes
- 1.
Citations of Shelley’s works, unless otherwise indicated, refer to Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). For “under Ionian skies,” see Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 403 (line 422). For “wildest of the Sporades,” see Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 392.
- 2.
See the quotation that heads this chapter: Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:235.
- 3.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 12. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 8–9. For translations of Hyperion I rely on Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion Or the Hermit in Greece, trans. Ross Benjamin (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008). I likewise refer, for all citations from the novel, to Hölderlin’s Sämtliche Werke, the Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe.
- 4.
Friedrich Schelling, Schellings Werke nach der Originalausgabe in neuer Ordnung, 12 vols., ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: E.H. Beck and R. Oldenburg, 1927), 2:503.
- 5.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 107. Foucault views this “intensification of the body” as a part of a “deployment of sexuality” that, from the eighteenth century on, supplants an older system of alliances and regulations regarding copulation and procreation: “the deployment of sexuality operates according to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of power” (Foucault, Sexuality, 106). I view vibrant materiality, particularly in its erotized form, as an example of this “mobile, polymorphous” deployment of sexuality.
- 6.
Only with the rise of feminist criticism, since the 1980s, have critics begun to take gender and embodiment in Hyperion seriously. See in particular Marlies Janz, “Hölderlins Flamme—zur Bildwerdung der Frau im ‘Hyperion,’” Hölderlin Jahrbuch 22 (1980–1981), 122–142; Tacey A. Rosolowski, “Specular Reciprocity and the Construction of the Feminine in Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion,” Modern Language Studies 25, no. 3 (Summer, 1995), 43–75; Yuna Shin, “‘She Would Rather Depart the Earth in Fire’: Reading Diotima’s Death in Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion Or the Hermit in Greece,” Women in German Yearbook, 15 (2000), 97–115. Goethe’s “eternal feminine” appears in the closing lines of Faust II.
- 7.
Rosolowski is particularly insightful on the issue of Diotima’s sustaining of Hyperion’s subjectivity through her gaze. Diotima, she argues, is “constructed as a feminine pseudo-other, who will complete the masculine subject’s discourse about itself.” Rosolowski, “Specular Reciprocity,” 54.
- 8.
Reading aspects of Hyperion in the context of Schelling’s aesthetics reminds us that it is not easy to know who had which ideas first. Certainly, Schelling’s ideas on the Beautiful were influenced by Hölderlin as much as the other way around. For more on Hölderlin’s influence on Schelling regarding intellectual intuition and aesthetics, see Xavier Tilliette, Untersuchungen über die intellektuelle Anschauung von Kant Bis Hegel. Schellingiana vol. 26, trans. Susanne Schaper, ed. Lisa Egloff and Katia Hay (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2015), 110–111.
- 9.
From Ideas toward a Philosophy of Nature (1797). Schelling, Werke, 2:25.
- 10.
Schelling, Werke, 2:56.
- 11.
Since an English translation of System of Transcendental Idealism is readily available, I cite it when possible. (I likewise refer to the original German text, Schellings Werke.) See Friedrich Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (University Press of Virginia, 1978), 13. Schelling, Werke, 3:351.
- 12.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 96. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:72.
- 13.
See Schelling, Werke, 3:629.
- 14.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 108–109. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:81.
- 15.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 4.1:216. For the translation, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau, ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: SUNY UP, 1988), 37–38.
- 16.
Schelling, System, 222. Schelling, Werke, 3:616.
- 17.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:236.
- 18.
Schelling, System, 222–223. Schelling, Werke, 3:617.
- 19.
Schelling, System, 223. Schelling, Werke, 3:617. Heath here translates “Begeisterung durch fremden Anhauch” awkwardly as “inspired by an afflatus from without.” I prefer my translation of this phrase, “the enthusiasm of an alien breath.”
- 20.
Schelling, System, 223. Schelling, Werke, 3:617.
- 21.
Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke, 3:615.
- 22.
Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke, 3:615.
- 23.
Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke, 3:615.
- 24.
Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke, 3:615.
- 25.
“Preface to the Penultimate Version of Hyperion.” Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:236. The Biblical allusion is to Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, 4:7.
- 26.
Schelling, System, 225. Schelling, Werke, 3:620.
- 27.
Schelling, System, 229–230. Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, 3:625.
- 28.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen.133 vols. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), I.47:12.
- 29.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 71. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:53.
- 30.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 71. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:53.
- 31.
Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke, 3:615.
- 32.
Working with Greek place names has certain orthographic and historical complications. Hölderlin, following the German translation of Chandler’s Travels in Greece, writes the island’s name as Kalaurea, a name typically anglicized today as Kalaureia, though sometimes Calauria or Kalavria. The latter is likewise used in contemporary German, and attempts to imitate the modern Greek pronunciation, accented on the penultimate syllable. In the original (English) edition Chandler calls it Calaurea, or at times Poro. For his 2008 translation, Ross follows Chandler by using Calaurea for Hölderlin’s Kalaurea. Since I cite this translation, I use Calaurea as well. Adding to the naming confusion, it is common to refer to the island today (as it clearly was in Chandler’s day also) as Poros (modern Greek: Πόρος). This term in fact designates the pair of islands, Sphairia and Kalaureia (Σφαιρία and Καλαυρία), separated from each other by a narrow channel, that together comprise Poros. As he does throughout Hyperion, Hölderlin bases his description of the flora and fauna of Kalaurea on the German translation of Chandler. For more on Hölderlin’s reliance on Chandler for his descriptions of the island, see Beissner, Hölderlin Werke, 3:456. See also: Richard Chandler, Reisen in Griechenland unternommen auf Kosten der Gesellschaft der Dilettanti (Leipzig: Weidmans, Erben, und Reich, 1777), 297–302. For Chandler’s original, English, account of Calaurea, see Richard Chandler, Travels in Greece: Or, an Account of a Tour made at the Expense of the Society of Dilettanti, Vol. 1. (Dublin: 1776), 220–223.
- 33.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 65. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:48–49.
- 34.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 65–66. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:49.
- 35.
Original: “das blaue Eiland.” Hyperion describes various islands he passes on his way to Calaurea as “blue .” Hölderlin, Hyperion, 66. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:49.
- 36.
See Chap. 2 for my comments on Hyperion as “lost in the wide bl ue” (Hölderlin, Hyperion, 12. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:8). “Father Ether” (Vater Aether) appears in Hölderlin’s lyric, “An den Aether,” (Sämtliche Werke, 1.1: 204) and in the elegy, “Brod und Wein,” (Sämtliche Werke, 2.1: 92). For “blue day” (der blaue Tag), in addition to Hyperion, see the lyric “Diotima” (Sämtliche Werke, 1.1:216).
- 37.
On Hölderlin’s use of the changing seasons as a structuring principle in Hyperion, see Cyrus Hamlin, “The Poetics of Self-Consciousness in European Romanticism: Hölderlin’s Hyperion and Wordsworth’s Prelude” (Genre 6, 1973), 150.
- 38.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 66–67. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:49–50.
- 39.
Schelling, Werke, 2:347. Rosolowski points out that for Hölderlin bl ue ether typically stands for “the masculine deity; the Father Ether, site of being,” and as such is “strictly polarized from the feminine, Maternal Earth” (“Specular Reciprocity,” 59–60).
- 40.
In Fragment von Hyperion , first published in Schiller’s journal, Neue Thalia, in 1794 (in a volume that also included Hölderlin’s poem, “Das Schicksal”), the character who becomes Diotima in the final version of the novel is called Melite, and comes from a “lonely valley of Mount Tmolus, on the banks of the Pactolus (river),” that is, near modern-day Mount Boz Dag in Turkey. Her father had moved into the mountains, away from the society of Smyrna (contemporary Izmir) because of his “disgust at the current situation of the Greeks.” In the final version of the novel no mention is made of Diotima’s father. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:70.
- 41.
John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 4.
- 42.
Hölderlin’s ode, “Der Mensch,” also envisions islands as the points of origin of all life. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 1.1:263.
- 43.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 86. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:64.
- 44.
Schelling, Werke, 2:12.
- 45.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 92. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:68.
- 46.
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:235.
- 47.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 93. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:70.
- 48.
Schelling, System, 222. Schelling, Werke, 3:616.
- 49.
Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 38. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 4.1:217.
- 50.
Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce. Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 544–545.
- 51.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 93–94. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:70.
- 52.
For an overview of Fre ud’s “pleasure principle” (Lustprinzip) and “reality principle” (Realitätsprinzip)—and the struggle between the two—see, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (Abriß der Psychoanlyse): Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, 18 vols., ed. Anna Freud, et al. (London: Imago Publishing, 1940–1952), 17:128–130. Here we are also again reminded of Fre ud’s off-hand dismissal of the unifying tendencies of eros as expressive of longing for a prior state of oneness. See Chap. 2, note 49.
- 53.
Schelling, System, 222. Schelling, Werke, 3:617.
- 54.
Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke 3:615.
- 55.
This definition of intellectual intuition comes from the fragment, “On the Difference of Poetic Modes” (Über den Unterschied der Dichtarten). See Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 84. Hölderlin, Werke, 4.1:267. The quotation on being is from the preface to the penultimate version of Hyperion. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:236.
- 56.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 94. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:70.
- 57.
See Plato’s Phaedo 76c, “Then our souls did exist earlier, Simmias, before entering human form, apart from bodies; and they possessed wisdom.” Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 24.
- 58.
Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 37. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 4.1:216.
- 59.
Schelling, Werke, 3:249.
- 60.
From Schelling’s essay that he appended to On the World Soul (1798), “On the Relation between the Ideal and Real in Nature, or the Development of a First Principle of the Philosophy of Nature after the Principles of Gravity and Light.” Schelling, Werke, 2:359.
- 61.
Schelling, System, 227. Schelling, Werke, 3:622.
- 62.
From the eighth of Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795). Schelling, Werke, 1:325.
- 63.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 94. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:71.
- 64.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 94. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:71.
- 65.
“aus meinem hartnäckigen Realismus.” See Goethe’s autobiographical essay on the origins of his friendship with Schiller, “Glückliches Ereignis” (“Fortunate Event”), Goethe, Werke, 2.11:13–20.
- 66.
Schelling, System, 229. Schelling, Werke, 3:625.
- 67.
Schelling, System, 229. Schelling, Werke, 3:625.
- 68.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 96. Hölderlin, Werke, 3:71–72.
- 69.
Schelling, System, 223. Schelling, Werke, 3:617.
- 70.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 95. Hölderlin, Werke, 3:71.
- 71.
Schelling, System, 222. Schelling, Werke, 3:616.
- 72.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 96. Hölderlin, Werke, 3:72.
- 73.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 192–193. Hölderlin, Werke, 3:143.
- 74.
Ryan, the first serious reader of the novel in the twentieth century, views the episode as a brief journey into Hölderlin’s realm of pure being (Seyn), which would lead to permanent, rather than temporary, death were Hyperion to remain too long. See Lawrence Ryan, Hölderlins Hyperion: Exzentrische Bahn und Dichterberuf (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965), 129. According to Walter Silz, there is no “physical love or sexual passion” in the novel at all to speak of. Walter Silz, Hölderlin’s Hyperion: A Critical Reading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 48. Cyrus Hamlin finds in it a “climactic” experience in which Hyperion loses “all conscious awareness of self” (though he mistakenly conflates this scene with that of Hyperion’s first meeting with Diotima in Notara’s garden). See Hamlin, “Poetics of Self-Consciousness,” 149. Gaskill acknowledges a physical component but is not certain if this means that something sexual occurs: “the ‘blackout’ is the result of an excess of fulfilment, spiritual, emotional, and physical (though not perhaps in a narrowly sexual sense). The experience is one which passes all human understanding.” See P. H. Gaskill, “‘Ich Seh’, ich sehe, wie das enden muss’: Observations on a Misunderstood Passage of Hölderlin’s Hyperion,” The Modern Language Review 76, no. 3 (1981), 615. Rosolowski sees the experience as a part of the process through which Hyperion establishes “specular reciprocity” with Diotima in an effort to shore up his own subjectivity. On her reading, Diotima herself functions as “an analogue of intellectual intuition,” which allows for this appropriative melding. Hyperion encounters Diotima in an “hallucinatory miasma,” a male “fantasy so emotional that he loses consciousness.” See Rosolowski, “Specular Reciprocity,” 48, 54, 59. Wolf Kittler likewise reads it a scene of melding (with the maternal): “Verschmelzung mit der Mutter gleich.” Wolf Kittler, “Ödipus oder Ajax: Hyperions Weg von Korinth nach Salamis.” Hyperion—Terra Incognita: Expeditionen in Hölderlins Roman (Opladen/Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), 219. For Harald Weilnböck the “gap” results from repression due to Hyperion’s unconscious fear of bodily contact: “die unbewußte Angst vor der intensiven Begegnungs- und Berührungserfahrung.” Harald Weilnböck, “‘wie an den Füßen ein Kind, ergriffen und an den Felsen geschleudert’: Die Gewaltthematik in Hölderlins Hyperion in beziehungsanalytischer Perspektive,” Hyperion—Terra Incognita: Expeditionen in Hölderlins Roman (Opladen/Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), 269.
- 75.
“That there is some kind of intuition or experience of the absolute is also a leitmotiv of Hyperion.” Beiser, German Idealism, 394. On Hyperion as the novel of intellectual intuition see also Tilliette, Untersuchungen, particularly Chap. 5, “Hölderlins Beitrag,” 112–113.
- 76.
Heath translates this as “astonished and blessed.” Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke, 3:615.
- 77.
Schelling, System, 223. Schelling, Werke, 3:617.
- 78.
On “readerly” (passive) versus “writerly” (as a reader actively engaged in the production of the text along with the writer), see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 4.
- 79.
See Hansjörg Bay,“Ohne Rückkehr”: utopische Intention und poetischer Prozess in Hölderlins Hyperion (Munich: Fink, 2003), 269–270. Bay contends that it is “foolish” (“töricht”) to read in this scene either simply the “trope of unsayability” (“Unsagbarkeitstopos”) or a coded representation of sexual union (“Deckwort für die geschlechtliche Vereinigung”). On his reading, the scene stands as a gap in Hyperion’s “life itself” (“eine Lücke im Leben selbst”), suggesting a death and rebirth that divides his life into two halves. This division, rather than a beginning of a romantic relationship (“Liebesbeziehung”) with Diotima, signals its end. By focusing on the Lüke as a cut or gap in Hyperion’s life, Bay claims to read what the text “literally says” (“das wörtlich Gesagte”) as opposed to nearly all other critics, who fill in the blank with their own version of what the text “supposedly means” (“angeblich gemeint”). To me this appears as a highly non-literary reading of a literary passage. Although I agree with Bay’s interpretation of the scene as a rupture in Hyperion’s life, as well as with his compelling reading of its effects on Hyperion’s relationship with Diotima, it appears untenable to me to suggest that this is the only reasonable interpretation, or to suggest that the supposed “literal” meaning of a literary passage (particularly one as intentionally mysterious as this) could exhaust hermeneutic possibility. To argue that the highly charged term “Daseyn,” which Hölderlin employs here—“eine Lüke in meinem Daseyn”—refers only to the course of Hyperion’s life, also strikes me as grossly limiting to literary reading. One need not look to Heidegger for the word’s complex range of meaning beyond something like “the course of one’s life,” but only to Hölderlin’s own fragment, “Urtheil und Seyn ,” which I have referenced several times in this study.
- 80.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 98. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:73.
- 81.
Schelling, System, 229. Schelling, Werke, 3:625.
- 82.
Rosolowski argues, quite rightly in my view, that Hyperion’s love for Diotima functions “as an analogue of intellectual intuition” (“Specular Reciprocity,” 47–48). Following my argument, I would only add that, taken as whole, the scene functions as Hölderlin’s fantasmatic version of intellectual intuition embodied in Diotima as aesthetic intuition.
- 83.
Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke, 3:615. Here we also have another example of what Rosolowski calls “specular reciprocity.”
- 84.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 192–193. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:143.
- 85.
Shakespeare, sonnet 130.
- 86.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 69. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:51. See Dante, Paradiso, Canto I (lines 5–10):
Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende
Fu’ io, e vidi cose che ridire
né sa né può chi di là sù discende,
perché appressando sé al suo disire
nostro intelletto si profonda tanto
che dietro la memoria non può ire.
In the heaven that receives most of his light
have I been, and I have seen things that
one who comes down from there cannot
remember and cannot utter,
for as it draws near to its desire, our intellect goes
so deep that the memory cannot follow it. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Robert M. During, ed. Robert M. During and Ronald L. Martinez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3:22–23.
- 87.
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World from Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 51. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, 6th ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 74.
- 88.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 69. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:51. I reference the blues song, “Eyesight to the Blind” by Sonny Boy Williamson II (a.k.a. Aleck Miller).
- 89.
Rosolowski argues that Diotima’s eyes are described as ether bl ue (typically masculine for Hölderlin) only following the erotic encounter, a sign that she now stands in “specular reciprocity” with Hyperion, shoring up his identity through narcissistic reflection (“Specular Reciprocity,” 59).
- 90.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 71. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:52–53.
- 91.
In this sense, I agree with Rosolowski that we can read this scene as “fantasy,” but fantasy on the part of Hölderlin rather than on the part of his fictional hero. Hölderlin stages a fantasmatic movement from Hyperion’s fantasy (the “dim divine image”) to its realization. This is the fantasy of the Romantic artist recovering all that he lost by means of aesthetic production. See Rosolowski, “Specular Reciprocity,” 59.
- 92.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 404 (line 455).
- 93.
For more on Shelley’s engagement with Kant, see Thomas Pfau, “Tropes of Desire: Figuring the ‘Insufficient Void of Self-Consciousness in Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion,’” Keats-Shelley Journal 40 (1991), 102–103. Regarding Shelley’s connections to Go ethe: Shelley knew Werther from an early age (as did most literary Europeans of the era). He concerned himself with Faust at three different points in his life: in 1815, while writing Alastor, in the summer 1816 with Byron, and finally just before his death in 1822. See F.W. Stokoe, German Influence in the English Romantic Period 1788–1818 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 144–154. See also Roxana M. Klapper, The German Literary Influence on Shelley. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 43 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1975), 14–16. On his reading of Winckelmann (and Friedrich Schlegel), see Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 19.
- 94.
Hamlin argues, for example, that—similar to the narrative strategy of Hyperion—the narrator of Wordsworth’s Prelude is transformed by the telling of his own life’s story: “a significant development of self-consciousness occurs in the perspective of the narrator upon his own life history as the telling of it proceeds.” Cyrus Hamlin, “The Poetics of Self-Consciousness in European Romanticism: Hölderlin’s Hyperion and Wordsworth’s Prelude. Genre 6 (1973), 142–177.
- 95.
Shelley, for example, also attempted to “liberate” his younger sister Hellen (she was only 12 at the time) from what he perceived as the patriarchal tyranny of their father by encouraging her to run away from home to live with him. See Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), 110–111. In a letter meant to be delivered in secret (but uncovered by the Father), Shelley appeals to Hellen in language that resonates with his proposal to spring Emily from her convent prison: “But if you were with me you would be with some one who loved you, you might run & skip read write think just as you liked.” Qtd. in Holmes, Shelley, 110.
- 96.
For a synopsis of Shelley’s relationship with Teresa Viviani , see Reimann and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry, 390–391. James Bieri also provides a vibrant account of Shelley’s “rescue fantasies” in relation to Teresa. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816–1822 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 214–218. For more on the Shelleys’ renaming her Emelia, see Bieri, Shelley, 215. Her connection to Shelley’s Greek fantasy island might also be explained in part by her appearance, in which he and Thomas Medwin found “an almost Grecian contour; the nose and forehead making a straight line.” Qtd. in Bieri, Shelley, 215.
- 97.
Shelley, Poetry, 392.
- 98.
Shelley, Poetry, 402.
- 99.
Shelley, Poetry, 404.
- 100.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 94. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:70.
- 101.
Schelling, Werke, 1:441–442.
- 102.
Shelley, Poetry, 404.
- 103.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 67, 80. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:50, 60.
- 104.
Shelley, Poetry, 405.
- 105.
Shelley, Poetry, 406.
- 106.
From Schelling’s On the World Soul. Schelling, Werke, 2:373.
- 107.
Shelley, Poetry, 405.
- 108.
Shelley, Poetry, 405.
- 109.
Shelley, Poetry, 406.
- 110.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 199. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:148.
- 111.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 92. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:68.
- 112.
Schelling, Werke, 2:347.
- 113.
Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 37. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 4.1:216.
- 114.
Shelley, Poetry, 406–407.
- 115.
Schelling, System, 225. Schelling, Werke, 3:620.
- 116.
In her attentive reading of this passage, Suzanne Barnett finds a hint that for Shelley “undifferentiated unity is doomed to failure,” noting that the moment of ecstasy, which denotes a loss of self (as it certainly also does for Hölderlin and Schelling, as we have seen), is by necessity “transient, impermanent.” She also argues that Shelley’s vision of all-unity (along the lines of Hölderlin’s notion of the asymptotic squaring of the circle) remains finally impossible since for Shelley “one spirit” will always be trapped within “two frames.” To these ideas I would add my argument that the notion of the vibrant object, and its paradoxical expression in various forms as something at once material and immaterial, appears here, particularly in his image of the burning-but-never-consumed bush, as Shelley’s attempt to solve this problem of all-unity’s ontological and temporal impossibility. Suzanne L. Barnett, Romantic Paganism: The Politics of Ecstasy in the Shelley Circle, The New Antiquity, ed. Matthew S. Santirocco (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 251.
- 117.
Nathaniel Brown also reads an orgasm in these lines. For him, Epipsychidion is a “highly erotic production, which moves at its close to a coital climax as powerful and explicit as anything that had yet issued from his [Shelley’s] pen.” Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley, 65.
- 118.
From the eighth of Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795). Schelling, Werke, 1:325.
- 119.
Schelling, System, 230. Schelling, Werke, 3:625.
- 120.
Schelling, System, 229. Schelling, Werke, 3:625.
- 121.
Shelley, Poetry, 399.
- 122.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 98. Hölderlin, Werke, 3:73.
- 123.
See Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry, 391.
- 124.
Shelley, Poetry, 95.
- 125.
Schelling, System, 224. Schelling, Werke, 3:618.
- 126.
Schelling, System, 225. Schelling, Werke, 3:619–620.
- 127.
For Diotima as “soul of Greece,” see Hölderlin, Hyperion, 162. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:121.
- 128.
For “art as the only true revelation (die einzige und ewige Offenbarung),” see Schelling, System, 223. Schelling, Werke, 3:618.
- 129.
Schelling, System, 224. Schelling, Werke, 3:618.
- 130.
Schelling, System, 221. Schelling, Werke, 3:615.
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Davis, W.S. (2018). Aesthetic/Erotic Intuition: Hölderlin, Shelley, and the Islands of the Archipelago. In: Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91292-9_4
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