[10] Also during this time, Hölderlin began playing the piano and developed an interest in travel literature through exposure to Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World.

There he fell in love with Luise Nast, the daughter of the monastery's administrator, and began to doubt his desire to join the ministry; he composed Mein Vorsatz in 1787, in which he states his intention to attain "Pindar's light" and reach "Klopstock-heights".

"[13] In October 1788, Hölderlin began his theological studies at the Tübinger Stift, where his fellow students included Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Isaac von Sinclair and Schelling.

There is a seminal manuscript, dated 1797, now known as the Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus ("The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism").

He then lived in Homburg from 1798 to 1800, meeting Susette in secret once a month and attempting to establish himself as a poet, but his life was plagued by financial worries and he had to accept a small allowance from his mother.

His mandated separation from Susette Gontard also worsened Hölderlin's doubts about himself and his value as a poet; he wished to transform German culture but did not have the influence he needed.

After a sojourn in Stuttgart at the end of 1800, likely to work on his translations of Pindar, he found further employment as a tutor in Hauptwyl, Switzerland, and then at the household of the Hamburg consul in Bordeaux, in 1802.

In a few months, however, he returned home on foot via Paris (where he saw authentic Greek sculptures, as opposed to Roman or modern copies, for the only time in his life).

Often he would play the piano or spontaneously write short verses for such visitors, pure in versification but almost empty of affect—although a few of these (such as the famous Die Linien des Lebens ("The Lines of Life"), which he wrote out for his carer Zimmer on a piece of wood) have a piercing beauty and have been set to music by many composers.

His mother died in 1828: his sister and stepbrother quarreled over the inheritance, arguing that too large a share had been allotted to Hölderlin, and unsuccessfully tried to have the will overturned in court.

Much later, Friedrich Nietzsche would recognize Hölderlin as the poet who first acknowledged the Orphic and Dionysian Greece of the mysteries, which he would fuse with the Pietism of his native Swabia in a highly original religious experience.

[23] Hölderlin developed an early idea of cyclical history and therefore believed political radicalism and an aesthetic interest in antiquity, and, in parallel, Christianity and Paganism should be fused.

Together with these long hymns, odes and elegies—which included "Der Archipelagus" ("The Archipelago"), "Brod und Wein" ("Bread and Wine") and "Patmos"—he also cultivated a crisper, more concise manner in epigrams and couplets, and in short poems like the famous "Hälfte des Lebens" ("The Middle of Life").

In his years of madness, Hölderlin would occasionally pencil ingenuous rhymed quatrains, sometimes of a childlike beauty, which he would sign with fantastic names (most often "Scardanelli") and give fictitious dates from previous or future centuries.

In 1804, his translations of the dramas of Sophocles were published but were generally met with derision over their apparent artificiality and difficulty, which according to his critics were caused by transposing Greek idioms into German.

Wilhelm Waiblinger, who visited Hölderlin in his tower repeatedly in 1822–23 and depicted him in the protagonist of his novel Phaëthon, stated the necessity of issuing an edition of his poems, and the first collection of his poetry was released by Ludwig Uhland and Christoph Theodor Schwab in 1826.

For the first time, Hölderlin's hymnic drafts and fragments were published and it became possible to gain some overview of his work in the years between 1800 and 1807, which had been only sparsely covered in earlier editions.

Norbert von Hellingrath enlisted in the Imperial German Army at the outbreak of World War I and was killed in action at the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

Rilke had met von Hellingrath a few years earlier and had seen some of the hymn drafts, and the Duino Elegies heralded the beginning of a new appreciation of Hölderlin's late work.

This undertaking was much more rigorous in textual criticism than the Berlin Edition and solved many issues of interpretation raised by Hölderlin's unfinished and undated texts (sometimes several versions of the same poem with major differences).

Though Hölderlin's hymnic style—dependent as it is on a genuine belief in the divine—creates a deeply personal fusion of Greek mythic figures and romantic mysticism about nature, which can appear both strange and enticing, his shorter and sometimes more fragmentary poems have exerted wide influence too on later German poets, from Georg Trakl onwards.

His theoretical works, such as the essays "Das Werden im Vergehen" ("Becoming in Dissolution") and "Urteil und Sein" ("Judgement and Being") are insightful and important if somewhat tortuous and difficult to parse.

They raise many of the key problems also addressed by his Tübingen roommates Hegel and Schelling, and, though his poetry was never "theory-driven", the interpretation and exegesis of some of his more difficult poems have given rise to profound philosophical speculation by thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou.

[24] Other composers of Hölderlin settings include Ludwig van Beethoven (An die Hoffnung - Opus 32), Peter Cornelius, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss (Drei Hymnen), Max Reger ("An die Hoffnung"), Alphons Diepenbrock (Die Nacht), Walter Braunfels ("Der Tod fürs Vaterland"), Richard Wetz (Hyperion), Josef Matthias Hauer, Denise Roger, Hermann Reutter, Margarete Schweikert, Stefan Wolpe, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten (Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente), Hans Werner Henze, Bruno Maderna (Hyperion, Stele an Diotima), Luigi Nono (Prometeo), Heinz Holliger (the Scardanelli-Zyklus), Hans Zender (Hölderlin lesen I-IV), György Kurtág (who planned an opera on Hölderlin), György Ligeti (Three Fantasies after Friedrich Hölderlin), Hanns Eisler (Hollywood Liederbuch), Viktor Ullmann, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Walter Zimmermann (Hyperion, an epistolary opera) and Wolfgang Rihm.

[27] In 2003, Graham Waterhouse composed a song cycle, Sechs späteste Lieder, for voice and cello based on six of Hölderlin's late poems.

Robert Schumann's late piano suite Gesänge der Frühe was inspired by Hölderlin, as was Luigi Nono's string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima and parts of his opera Prometeo.