Hölderlin, Blake: Newton

Abstract

The picture and the poem were born at about the same time, in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The poem was written by a young man in Germany, solitary and most sensitive; the picture was created by an English painter and mystical poet, half a generation the young man’s senior. Holderlin, the German, a younger contemporary of Goethe and Schiller was probably the greatest and certainly the most ill-fated genius of German romanticism. The painter who created his poems and prophetic books, together with his graphic art, produced and printed with a peculiar technique, was called William Blake. Holderlin, admiring the spirit of the Greeks and enchanted by a great and unrequited poetic love during the short creative period of his life, spent his last decades in the misery of schizophrenia. Blake, having toiled with great visions during his long life, expressed all his inner experiences in a symbolic language, which made him perhaps the greatest poet of the early Romantic movement in England. Certainly, the last thing one would expect of either of the two Romantic poets is to be inspired by the strict ideas of Science. Still, Holderlin celebrates Kepler and Newton in an ode, and Blake paints Newton’s figure or, to be more precise, paints a figure stating that it represents Newton. It is not easy to understand.