Tracing And Turning:A Study On Poetry Of H(?)lderlin’s Tragedy

The German poet Johann Christian Friedrich H(?)lderlin studied Greek tragedy in the mid to late period of his writing career,from 1797 to 1804,creating Der Tod des Empedokles,Die Trauerspiele des Sophokles and several theoretical texts.In the progressive thinking of the fate of human being and national poetic spirit,H(?)lderlin’s poetry of tragedy shows a significant tension in the middle and late periods.The clue of H(?)lderlin’s poetry is "tracing" and "turning",which is also the idea of this study."Tracing" symbolizes H(?)lderlin’s spiritual traveling to classical Greece,in the way of reproducing Greek tragedy and harmonious aesthetics."Turning" means H(?)lderlin’s point of poetry has shifted from classical Greece to the “Vaterland”Germany.H(?)lderlin made changes to his early theory.From the aesthetic form to the spiritual material,H(?)lderlin found a balance between ancient Greek tradition and the spirit of the modern West,constructing an original poetry.There are three chapters: The first chapter analyzes Der Tod des Empedokles,explaining the tragedy fate of Empedocles and the aesthetic education of Schiller that this fate embodies.The first chapter also outlines the thread of the tragedy’s development from the first to the third draft: the plot simplified and the philosophical discourse increased.H(?)lderlin failed to achieve both the dramatic and philosophical discursive goals.Empedocles was a Greek whose fate was different from contemporary German.The tragedy was thrice drafted and not completed.H(?)lderlin turned to the translation of Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Rex.The second chapter takes H(?)lderlin’s Notes on Oedipus and Notes on Antigone as the text for analysis,explaining the three dimensions on H(?)lderlin’s original tragedy poetry: first,he proposed a form of tragedy based on modern philosophy;second,he highlighted the words of the oracle in Sophocles’ work,making German correspond with Greek religious language through translation;third,he clarified Oedipus’ act of forgetting and usurping the divine by rationality as a "Westerner",thus distinguishing between the Greek and Western fate of “death” and“destruction”.The important chapter three combining theoretical texts and later poetry,summarises H(?)lderlin’s poetry of tragedy.H(?)lderlin defined the essence of tragedy as’ paradox’,and the tragedy form is a manifestation of the idea of paradoxical structure,presenting the conflict between gods and human being.The relationship between gods and human being is the tragedy fate presented in different eras.H(?)lderlin developed an understanding of the nothingness of Subject and intermediate stages of history and foreshadowed the returning of the divine in the way of new myth.From tragedy form to tragedy fate,the spirit of Greek and Western poetry is a chiasmus structure,which under the ontological tension between “das Eigene” and “des Fremden”.Here H(?)lderlin offered a cultural criticism of imitation of the classics in the background of Hellenism,a distortion of the one-way historical picture from Greece to the West,a retrospective journey in cultural geography from Germany to ancient Greece and to the “East”.In H(?)lderlin’s tragedy poetry,the “Hauslichkeit” in German culture was eliminated and here came to the community of divine and beauty.