Walther Killy (26 August 1917 – 28 December 1995) was a German literary scholar who specialised in poetry, especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl.
He became known as editor of literary encyclopedias, the Killy Literaturlexikon and the Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie.
[2] Since Hölderlin was held in high esteem during the Nazi era, this undertaking received broad official support.
[2] When Killy returned from being a prisoner of war in Colorado,[3] he received his doctorate from the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen on 19 March 1948 with a dissertation entitled Bild und Mythe in Hölderlin's Poems (Image and myth in Hölderlin's poems).
[4] Three years later, he received his habilitation at the Free University of Berlin (FU)[1] with a textual critic of Hölderlin's novel Hyperion.