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Friedrich Hölderlin

Poet · German · 18th–19th c.

German poet (1770–1843). In "Hyperion" and "The Death of Empedocles" he fused longing for ancient Greece with despair at modernity. Descending into mental illness at 36, he spent the remaining 36 years in a carpenter's tower — during which some of his most celebrated late poems were written. Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin made him central to 20th-century German philosophy. The paradigmatic figure of the poet destroyed by visionary intensity.