A poet’s calling or on tragic as a task of Hölderlin’s poetry

Abstract

This paper examines how the question of the Tragic is defined according to Hölderlin, an important German poet from the XVIII century. In 1804, Hölderlin translates and comments the plays Oedipus the King and Antigone, by Sophocles. This paper focuses on the investigation about the Tragic undertaken by Hölderlin in the third part of his Remarks on Oedipus; in this part, some elements which are singular to his thought come up, such as the Caesura, the Mutual Unfaithfulness and the Categorical Reversal. These elements allowed Hölderlin to address the question of the Tragic from an entirely new perspective for his time and provided the emergence of important further debates both in Literature and Philosophy. There are two main questions which guide the argumentation of this paper: the first one refers to Hölderlin’s singular conception of the paradoxes that commonly constitute the Tragic, such as the one between the human and the divine; and the second one, the analysis of the poetic task of Modernity as a possible task to every single poem.