MAN'S DWELLING
Hölderlin’s saying – “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth” – is hardly registered by us, has not been fully fathomed; nor has it entered our collective memory.2 And how could it? In light of contemporary reality – a reality regarding itself, and the very reserves it draws on, as that of a self-made and self-sustained society – the poet’s saying is easily watered down by just about anybody as fanciful. Poetry is seen in contemporary society as the production of literature.
That Hölderlin’s saying is not taken seriously is also testified to by the present stage of Hölderlin research. That research groups the saying among the poet’s “questionable works” because its text has not come down to us in manuscript form, or so Wilhelm Waiblinger emphatically states at the close of his 1823 novel Phaedon. By contrast, Norbert von Hellingrath’s “Prologue to a First Edition of Hölderlin’s Translations of Pindar” (1911, page 58, note 3), talks of “passages that in essence well could be genuine.” Hellingrath’s [214] efforts at researching Hölderlin’s oeuvre rested on a distinct poetic approach to the poet himself – a poet (Hölderlin) who one day may stand revealed as the poet herald of a future art of poetry.
2. “Hölderlin’s saying”: Wort is translated in this essay, of course, as “word,” but primarily as “saying” and “message,” as it refers both to the entire line “Full of merit…” and, as Heidegger sees it, the message inherent in Hölderlin’s poetry.