An Anthropology of Madness
A review of poet Nathaniel Tarn’s The Hölderliniae (2021)
The tortured verse and tragic life of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) are the inspiration for Nathaniel Tarn’s latest work, The Hölderliniae. For Tarn, Hölderlin is a poet who was “slowly murdered,” who “lived and died among the dying,” while suffering from debilitating mental illness during the final, tragic decades of his life. As Tarn recounts, Hölderlin fell into a deep depression after the death of his beloved, Suzette Gontard, in 1802. He was forced by his mother to live briefly in an insane asylum in Tübingen, as no one in his family was willing to care for him while he was ill.
After his release, Hölderlin passed the final decades of his life in the home of a carpenter who respected his literary genius. By this point, however, Hölderlin had ceased composing poetry, or indeed communicating at all. He lived in almost total isolation from the word, in a tower facing the river Neckar.
It is not difficult to understand why a poet such as Tarn would be attracted to a figure like Hölderlin. Both poets preferred a life at odds with the world, neither at home in…
