Buddhist Romanticism

years of relative sanity remaining to him, Hölderlin was to write many
religious poems in a prophetic tone that combined the myths and images of
classical Greece with those of the Bible into a pantheism and polytheism of
his own.
1799 proved to be a critical year for Hölderlin. His efforts to find backing
for his new journal met with no success and he could find no other work
near Frankfurt, which meant that the affair with Susette had to end. His old
mood swings began to recur, and Sinclair was often called on to intervene
when his periodic shouting rages and “strumming on his piano” provoked
angry threats from his neighbors. Feeling rejected on all sides, Hölderlin
abandoned his philosophical writings and decided to devote his writing
talents totally to poetry. He accepted work outside of Germany, first as a
tutor to a family in Switzerland, then as a tutor to the family of the
Hamburg consul in Bordeaux. In neither case, though, was he stable
enough to hold his position for long. In both cases, he walked to his new
position and then back home to Germany alone.
On his return from France, in 1802, he received a letter from Sinclair with
news that Susette had died of measles. The news of her death, combined
with the rigors of the trip, left Hölderlin a broken man, both physically and
mentally. Schelling, writing to Hegel after meeting Hölderlin at this time,
diagnosed his state as “derangement.” Sinclair arranged for Hölderlin to
obtain medical treatment with a physician who found that reading Homer
to Hölderlin in the original Greek was most effective in calming his mind.
As Hölderlin’s condition began to improve, Sinclair found him work that
would not tax his health.
Despite his brittle emotional state, Hölderlin was able to complete, and
get published, his translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone. The
translations were criticized at the time for being too strange—Hölderlin had
hewn closely to the syntax of the Greek—but eventually they became more
widely appreciated. He also continued work on multiple drafts of his
tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, but the work remained unfinished.
He also put into writing, both in essays and poems, his thoughts on
tragedy. True to his love for the Greek tradition, he saw tragedy as
intimately connected with religion. Because he also felt that religion was
primarily a matter of feeling, his writings on tragedy provide a window
onto his feelings at this time.
A tragic poem, he said, is a metaphor of a particular intellectual point of
47