The Idea of Greece and Poetry in Friedrich Hölderlin, Martin Heidegger and John Keats

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay seeks to explore the idea of Greece as inspiration for poetry in the works of Friedrich Holderlin, Martin Heidegger, and John Keats. More specifically, I will deal with Holderlin’s hymn “Greece” (Griechenland), Heidegger’s elucidations of the poem, and Keats’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” focusing on the role of Greece in poetic articulations of beauty and truth. While Holderlin, Heidegger and Keats are distinct from one another in terms of their backgrounds in the intersections of Greece, Germany, and Great Britain, their works exhibit a similarity regarding the idea of Greece and poetic truth. They all try to incorporate ancient Greece into their notions of poetry and art. Regardless of their cultural differences, the idea of Greece equally serves as the frame of reference to reinforce the creative imagination as well as the self-reflexive meditation on the relationship between the self and alterity. Both Holderlin and Heidegger regard ancient Greece as the oriental that defines modern Germany as the occidental; Keats finds an ideal conjoining of beauty and truth in his poetizing of Greek art. The poetic dialogues between Greece and Germany as well as between Greece and Britain similarly entail the linguistic revelation of truth and beauty that relies mostly on the imagination. I argue that Holderlin’s pursuit of human destiny, Heidegger’s claim for truth as the unconcealment of Being, and Keats’s poetizing art address creative susceptibility to Hellenic influence. Yet Greece remains irreducibly foreign, or as the idea, rather than the reality for Holderlin, Heidegger and Keats; the foreignness of Greece constitutes the very formation of German identity and English poetry alike.

참고문헌 (Reference)

1 Kelley, Theresa M, "“Keats, Ekphrasis, and History.” Keats and History" Cambridge UP 212-237, 1995

2 Wolfson, Susan J, "The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry" Cornell UP 1986

3 Heidegger, Martin, "The Origin of the Work of Art" Perennial Classics 15-86, 1971

4 Heidegger, Martin, "The Ister" Indiana UP 1996

5 Hölderlin, Friedrich, "Selected Poems and Fragments" Penguin 1998

6 Webb, Timothy, "Romantic Hellenism, In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism" Cambridge UP 148-176, 1993

7 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, "Poetry’s Courage, In Walter Benjamin and Romanticism" Continuum 163-179, 2002

8 Warminski, Andrzej, "Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin" Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions 77 : 193-209, 1990

9 Keats, John, "Letters of John Keats" Oxford UP 1970

10 Keats, John, "Keats: The Complete Poems" Longman 1970

11 Bromwich, David, "Keats and Hazlitt" Chelsea House Publishers 175-210, 1985

12 Heidegger, Martin, "Introduction to Metaphysics" Yale Nota Bene 2000

13 Hölderlin, Friedrich, "Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone" Bloodaxe Books 2001

14 Heidegger, Martin, "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, In Existence and Being. Intro. Werner Brock" Henry Regnery Company 291-316, 1949

15 Hölderlin, Friedrich, "Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory" State University of New York Press 1988

16 Heidegger, Martin, "Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry" Humanity Books 2000