Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge (review)

Philosophical engagement with poetry is a time-honored if hazardous enterprise. The philosophic penchant for abstraction and the clarity of conceptual analysis and argument are hard to square with the concrete imagery and the density, allusiveness, and Vieldeutigkeit of the poetic statement. It is tempting for the philosophically inclined reader to mine poetic work for illustrations of independently existing philosophical positions and to ignore the distinctively poetic qualities of the poems themselves. With full awareness of the risks, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge has written an exemplary book that takes seriously the philosophical and ethical potential of lyric poetry in general, illuminates the contributions of Hölderlin and Rilke to the task of getting oriented in (communal) spaces of significance, and that rarely forgets that her principal objects are not philosophical essays or systematic treatises but poems. Lyric Orientations is a rich work that cannot be fully discussed, or fairly quarreled with, in a short review.

Taking cues from Stanley Cavell on skepticism—as both a truth about the human condition to be acknowledged and, in certain (epistemological) forms, as a temptation to be resisted—Eldridge argues persuasively that several late poems by Friedrich Hölderlin and eight of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus reveal the importance, perhaps the human necessity, of replacing the quest for certainty, or the desire to attain certain knowledge of the world and others, with uncertain and unsponsored acknowledgment of the claims external reality and other minds make upon us. Students of Cavell are likely to find nothing especially novel in her rehearsal of his views on skepticism in the first chapter, nor will it satisfy readers attuned to more philosophical efforts to overcome skepticism, but Eldridge summarizes the relevant problem clearly, and recourse to Cavell and skepticism set the stage for close and careful readings of the theoretical, literary, and poetic material to follow in the next four chapters. She manages to avoid anachronism, paying careful attention to the ways in which the overarching problem of skepticism shows up in the languages specific to each poet.

The second and third chapters deal specifically with Hölderlin. Here her use of Cavell yields especially fruitful results. A large body of work on Hölderlin and/or his contemporaries in the romantic tradition (Henrich, Frank, Beiser, Nassar, inter alia) attempts to situate the poets from the period in relation to the systematic ambitions of German idealism. Although Eldridge is aware of Hölderlin's relation to Kant and Fichte, her work on Hölderlin's poetological texts (chapter 2), which sets the stage for engagement with the poems themselves, and three poems from his late period (chapter 3) sidestep debates over the poet's commitment to idealism or realism, in a reading that places the poet's aspirations in line with the problem of acknowledging the condition of uncertain subjectivity and discovering poetically mediated forms of communal and personally integrated life (in opposition to the tendency toward fragmentation emblematic of modern forms of life and its institutions). Her interpretation of "Das Nächste Beste" is one of the best brief discussions of the poem's complex and open-ended stances on the possibility of poetry's capacity to achieve the sort of wholeness Hölderlin's late poetry seeks.

In the fourth and fifth chapters Eldridge enters the ranks of a small company of philosophically inspired readers of Rilke in the Anglophone world (Lysaker, Fischer). Chapter 4 paves the way with a provocative interpretation of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) that reveals Rilke's persistent anxieties facing a world in which the boundaries between self and other have become unsettlingly insecure and, relatedly, "the (historical) institutions supposed to control such interpenetration [between self and other] consistently break down" (129). Addressing persistent doubts in the secondary literature about the relationship between the first and second parts of Rilke's novel, Eldridge provides an account of Malte...