Walter Benjamin, "Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin," trans. Stanley Corngold, and Friedrich Hölderlin, "On the Process of the Poetic Mind," trans Ralph R. Read III

 LACOUE-LABARTHE'S DISCUSSION of this Benjamin essay was so interesting that I wanted to track it down. It turns out Benjamin wrote it when very young, 22 or 23, and it went unpublished in his lifetime. The translation I read is in the first volume of Harvard University Press's Selected Writings.

I'm not sure I followed Benjamin every step of the way here, as the essay was not an easy read, but in it he contrasts the first version of Hölderlin's short poem "Dichtermuth" ("The Poet's Courage," per Hamburger) with its revision, "Blödigkeit" ("Timidness," again per Hamburger). 

I had read both poems in Hamburger's Selected Poems without noticing the one was a revision of the other, for they go in quite different directions, but with Benjamin's help I saw the connection. He too sees them as going in quite different directions, though.

The crucial relationship in "Dichtermuth," as Benjamin sees it, is between the poet and the gods. He writes: "The sun  god is the poet's ancestor, and his death is the destiny through which the poet's death, at first mirrored, becomes real. A beauty whose inner source we do not know dissolves the  figure of the poet--scarcely less that of the god--instead of forming it." The poem is "rank with mythology."

In "Blödigkeit," though, the crucial relationship is between the poet and other people. In this version, "The incorporation of the people into that conception of life in the first version has turned into a connectedness, in destiny, between the living and  the poet."

In "The Poet's Courage," the poet is at a point between people and the gods, but in "Blödigkeit" the poet is between the people and...life, maybe? Which sounds like a promising idea--not so much the "pale mouth'd prophet dreaming" as Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day, perhaps.

I found one of Hölderlin's own accounts of his poetics in a piece included in the volume German Romantic Criticism from Continuum's German Library. His prose in translation is even more daunting than Benjamin's, but I think Hölderlin did align with what Benjamin found in "Blödigkeit"--that is, the poet in a deep engagement with life/living that he wants to recreate in readers' minds: 

[...] one can say that in every element in question, both objectively and actually real, something ideal faces that which is ideal, something living that which is living, something individual that which is individual, and the question is only what is to be understood by this circle of effect. It is that in which and on which the poetic enterprise and process  in question is realized, the vehicle of the mind through which it reproduces itself in itself and in others.