"May my word be sacred"

The poetry of Hölderlin, as interpreted by Heidegger and Blanchot.

Abstract

The following article discusses how both Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot interpret some essential aspects of the content of Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry. For both, Hölderlin is the poet of poets, and his work excels the rest, not because of its stylistic beauty, but because of its ability to raise questions of the highest philosophical order. Each philosopher's interpretation of Hölderlin's poems illuminates each one's different way of understanding Being and the existence of the truth that leads to it. For the Heidegger after Being and Time, Hölderlin is the poet that makes poetry about poetry, allowing the reader to enter the world of Dasein's own language and thus unveil its being. For the German philosopher, the poet —more than the philosopher—is the only one truly capable of noticing the dramatic absence of the mystery of Being among us mortals, and Hölderlin is the only poet who attempts to communicate to readers that perception. On the other hand, for Blanchot, Hölderlin has the skill to show how language encloses within itself its own impossibility, for it tries to grasp the being of constantly changing things through conceptualization. The poem, on the other hand, does not have for Blanchot the aspiration to conceptualize, but to turn in on itself. This is paradigmatically expressed in Hölderlin. In this way, the German poet would open up the particular possibility of recovering a world that, unlike the reassuring and stable structure presented by linguistic syntagms, is in a constant and unstable change.