How are we to understand the varying nature of these variants? Does one variant just go in place of another, with a preceding one extinguished by a subsequent one – such that only the final one remains valid for the text’s final form?
How are we to understand the varying nature of these variants? Does one variant just go in place of another, with a preceding one extinguished by a subsequent one – such that only the final one remains valid for the text’s final form?
The Stuttgart edition (II, 868) sets down these variants as listed “one above the other,” but adopts “unrestrained,” (occurring in the list’s topmost position) instead of “unpoetic” as the text’s authoritative reading (II, 234 and 237). This might be true if we were adhering to a philological rule (see the Stuttgart Edition I, 319). But it is not ‘poetologically’ true; it does not reveal what the poet wants to say and record.
The variants show Hölderlin’s effort at determining the meaning of “poetic” in “unpoetic.” The “unpoetic” names the unessential of the “poetic,” that which in it is uncanny or not “at home.” “Unpoetic” is the adjective used to qualify “having much to say,” to qualify how “the nocturnal spirit” speaks, “who has our land / Enticed,” – a spirit who is, “in storming the heavens,” hostile, even rebellious against the heavens.
In being “unpoetic” the “poetic” does not disappear, but rather the “finite” is dismissed, the “peaceful” troubled, the “bound” undone, the “restrained” wrongfully transforms into the “unleashed.” All this tells us: that which bestows measure is not admitted, the very reception of measure is suppressed. The region that would be so inclined is instead buried under debris.
What leaps to mind is how the quoted fragments mentioning the “unpoetic” – fragments certified in manuscript form – belong together with the apocryphal text of the saying, “poetically man dwells.”
Meanwhile, one difference between the two texts still remains. “The Nearest Best,” that fragment published by Hellingrath, does not speak of man’s dwelling. Or at least, so it seems. For exactly that impression is put to rest by that fragment’s text [219] variant entitled “draft hymn” offered by Friedrich Beissner in the Stuttgart edition.