Hölderlin enunciates the law of becoming homely for the Germans. Yet Hölderlin not only knows what the law of the historicality of German and Western history says. Hölderlin knows at the same time the sole way in which this law can be experienced and told. This law unveils itself only to the poet! Why must this be so? Why must this law of history. and thereby the essential law of Western and German humankind. be said poetically in this decisive historical period for the Germans?
This question too the poet has answered poetically in his own way. yet without posing it in this manner. Only late, in his last and most alienating word. does the answer arrive: the poem "In beautiful blue with its / Metallic roof the church tower blossoms" (VI, 24). Hölderlin there says:
Voll Verdienst. doch dichterisch wohnet Der Mensch auf dieser Erde. —
Full of merit, yet poetically Humans dwell upon this earth. —
This word is obscure in its provenance, and yet it is unthinkable without the wakeful spirit of Hölderlin. It contains a restriction placed on something initially conceded. "Full of merit ..." humans indeed dwell. In what they effect and in their works they are capable of a fullness. It is almost impossible to survey what humans achieve, the way in which they establish themselves upon this earth in using and exploiting and working it, in protecting it and securing it and furthering their "art," that is, in Greek, τέχνη. "Yet" — none of this reaches into the essential ground of their dwelling upon this earth. All this working and achieving, this building and cultivating, is merely cultura, culture. Culture is always already only the consequence of a "dwelling," of a being "at home" of spirit. Such dwelling, however, being properly homely, is "poetic." The middle and ground of dwelling, that is, the "hearth of the house," is nothing that could be discerned or seized upon through making or achieving within the realm or whatever is actual. Dwelling itself, being homely, is the becoming homely or a being unhomely. The latter is grounded in the poetic. Yet how and whence and when is the poetic? Is it something produced by poets, or are the poets and the poetic determined by poetry? But what is the essence of Poetry? Who determines this? Can it be read off from the many meritorious achievements of human beings upon the earth? It seems so, because poetry