Poetry Criticism | Trakl, Georg - Theodore Fiedler (essay date 1972)

Theodore Fiedler (essay date 1972)

SOURCE: "Holderlin and Trakl's Poetry of 1914," in Friedrich Holderlin: An Early Modern, The University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 87-105.

[In the following excerpt, Fiedler shows how specific rhetorical patterns used by Holderlin were developed in Trakl's work as it matured; he asserts that the latter poet was "modern" in his poetical achievement.]

Trakl's interest in Hölderlin, a matter whose significance has all too readily been exaggerated by some and dismissed out of hand by others, can be traced throughout his oeuvre. As early as 1906, for example, in a rather hapless prose poem entitled "Barrabas. Eine Phantasie," Trakl employed the striking title of Hölderlin's hymn "Der Einzige" to identify the figure of Christ crucified. Yet it is not until late 1912 that Trakl's interest in his predecessor, apparently focused for the first time on the odes, elegies, and hymns of Hölderlin's maturity that...

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