The Young Hoelderlin

Without exaggeration one might say that Shelton paints a whole, new picture of Holderlin in his monograph. He is the first writer to present the young Holderlin, not of the viewpoint of his later works, but objectively and unprejudiced. He makes use of the sources to reveal the young man, the student he was in this period of his life. The result is the first Holderlin biography that is free of grafted-on concepts and hindsight in interpretation, of falsifications that arise from seeing Holderlin from a certain angle and interpreting his works according to preconceived notions."