This book explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. It focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770—1843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875—1926). While Hölderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believed in the power of poetic language to orient us as social beings in contexts that otherwise can be alienating. They shared the conviction that such alienation cannot be overcome once and for all in any universal event. Both argued that to ... More

This book explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. It focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770—1843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875—1926). While Hölderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believed in the power of poetic language to orient us as social beings in contexts that otherwise can be alienating. They shared the conviction that such alienation cannot be overcome once and for all in any universal event. Both argued that to deny the uncertainty created by the absence of any such event (or to deny the alienation itself) is to deny the particularly human condition of uncertainty and mortality. By drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell, the book challenges poststructuralist scholarship, which stresses the limitations of language in the face of reality. The book provides detailed readings of Hölderlin and Rilke and positions them in a broader narrative of modernity that helps make sense of their difficult and occasionally contradictory self-characterizations. The book reconciles the ambitious claims that Hölderlin and Rilke make for poetry—that it can create political communities, that it can change how humans relate to death, and that it can unite the sensual and intellectual components of human subjectivity—and the often difficult, fragmented, or hermetic nature of their individual poems.