3: “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin”

Ari Appel
Ari Appel
Sep 1, 2018 · 4 min read

There is no good place to start this essay. “Two Poems by Freidrich Hölderlin” was one of the most inspirational, yet difficult essays I have ever read. I am sure there will be more surprises to come as I make my way through five volumes of Benjamin’s works. This essay advanced several concepts: myth, spatiotemporal space, the determined and the determinative, function, relation, myth, form, and the poetized in analyzing two drafts of a Hölderlin poem. Freidrich Hölderlin was a German poet of the late 18th and early 19th century of the German Idealist and Romantic movements. His poems analyzed by Benjamin are “The Poet’s Courage” and “Timidity.” I don’t think the poems are available online, and I don’t want to reproduce them here in case it’s a copyright issue, but they are both fantastic poems (Benjamin favors the second). If you have a copy of Benjamin’s essay, he reproduces them there.

In this essay I will advance Benjamin’s concept of the “poetized” as a useful analytical concept and apply it to an everyday situation. But before I do this, allow me to comment on my previous essay. I have realized that in my second essay, I lost some of the discipline that I must have at this task. I ignored some of the fundamental characteristics of Benjamin’s essay in order to be done with writing mine. I will leave the second essay as it is but will make sure to take a more disciplined approach to the third. I don’t mind writing reviews of Benjamin’s essays if that is what they call for.

Now I will begin to expound Benjamin’s concept of the “poetized.” After confusingly musing on the concept for several pages, Benjamin provides a clear definition: it is “a sphere of relation between the work of art and life, whose unities themselves are wholly ungraspable. In this way the poetized will come to light as the precondition of the poem, as its inner form, as artistic task.” This is the poetized — the essential poem that underlies any specific manifestation of the poem. It is a sketched up form of truth on a level of being between the work of art and life. In this sense it is the poem’s “inner form,” and it is “artistic task” in the sense that it is the task of the poem’s creation, the immanent plane of desire that we can call authorial intent without specifically referring to the author’s actual intent. It is a being-feeling that underlies the poem. Benjamin analyzes two drafts of the same poem because they almost wholly share a poetized; the concept of the poetized is distinguished as both poems are analyzed with it in mind. By my understanding, Benjamin believes that the first poem distracts itself from pure relations between the forms of the poem and the poetized with through mythological significance and allegory, while the second provides a more direct path to the poetized than the first. But he never directly writes anything negative about the second, only implying that he likes the first better by speaking about the first’s use of myth. But the purpose of my essay is only to glean the concept of the poetized and advance it.

The poetized does not just apply to poems, but to speech as well. A comment made my a friend, a teacher, or a parent can be conceived to possess “a sphere of relation between [itself] and life,” a “precondition” of itself. In this way the more we think about the “poetized,” the less we think about what is meant by the comment, and the more we think about where it comes from. This concept can increase empathy and our self-awareness of our condition. For analyzing literature, it brings forth the essence of the work without calling upon the ever-elusive authorial intent. This concept shows Benjamin’s desire to judge things by what they really are rather than what they appear to be (though, as a Rhetoric major, I can understand how these things are interconnected). Benjamin is a cultural critic of truth itself rather than the Foucauldian “manifestation of truth” or truth’s appearance which has become so popular recently. The wonderful thing about Benjamin is that he does it without essentializing or claiming that this realm of the “poetized” is at all immanent within the poem; it is a realm of relation between to spheres whose unities remain “wholly ungraspable.”

I would like to advance a concept of my own inspired by Benjamin’s concept of the poetized, the moment of charm. The moment of charm is the moment at which a poem or piece of aesthetics becomes completely about aesthetics and not at all about the poetized. Commercials are predicated on maximizing moments of charm and increasing distance between the viewer and the poetized. The poetized, in the case of the commercial, the true form to which the commercial alludes, is a simple pitch to buy a certain product. Since this pitch is by nature manipulative, commercials maximize moments of charm to increase distance between the aesthetic product and the poetized. The viewer identifies with moments of charm, the primary one being the brand. The brand becomes completely separated from the product, an aesthetic fragment completely at odds with materiality. Materiality surges back into the picture when the consumer re-associates the brand with a need or a desire. In itself, the brand is completely immaterial and apolitical; it is a pun of visuality. The moment of charm maximizes the apolitical nature of the brand.

Benjamin, Walter. “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin.” In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 1, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 18–36. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.