The thirty hymns of The H??lderliniae are inspired by the intricacies and transcendent humanity of Beethoven's last quartets. Nathaniel Tarn's new book opens with a biographical note on the ?Poet of Poets,? Friedrich H??lderlin, setting the scene and introducing the doomed love of the poet's life, Diotima; it ends in the Neckar River, the river of H??lderlin's birth and death. Through affairs of love and polity, Tarn speaks through H??lderlin, and H??lderlin speaks through Tarn. The French Revolution?which H??lderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terror?illuminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall those past tragedies. Line after line carries H??lderlin's hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind's disciplines and make a universe of its own. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ??
