In the euphonious movement of its prose, in the sublimity and beauty of the figures that appear in it, Hyperion makes an impression upon me similar to the beat of the waves of the troubled sea. Indeed, this prose is music, soft melting sounds interrupted by painful dissonances, finally expiring in dark, uncanny dirges. —Friedrich Nietzsche
The greatest lyric poets, for instance Hölderlin or Keats, are men in whom the mythic power of insight breaks forth again in its full intensity and objectifying power… —Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, 1946
But if there were words in which to grasp the relation between myth and the inner life from which the later poem sprang it would be those of Hölderlin. ‘Myths, which take leave of the earth, / … They return to mankind.’ —Walter Benjamin
The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin unquestionably belongs in the intense company of Shelley, Kleist, Novalis, Lenz, and Büchner…. [Hölderlin] is one of the great writers’ lives, full of intensity and movement, work and projects, abrupt departures and friendships ….it was reading Hölderlin that gave Rilke the impetus for his Duino Elegies. —Michael Hofmann
