And what does that mean? Does Hölderlin even speak of it? Norbert von Hellingrath, under the section entitled “Fragments and Drafts,” presents us with a short text with the heading of “The Nearest Best.” It goes as follows:
[O]pen are heaven’s windows
And set free is the nocturnal spirit,
Who in storming the heavens has our land
Enticed, and, by having much to say, by being unpoetic,
Has wallowed in the debris
Up to this very hour.
And yet what I yearn for, it will come, … .7
Does “unpoetic,” as used here, mean the same thing as not poetic? In no way. Yet, if these terms are to connote different things, in what respects do they demand that we differentiate them?
There is an answer readily at hand. The difference lies in the manner of negation. A triangle for example is not poetic, but it can never be unpoetic. For, to be that, it must have been able to be poetic – such that it could, in this regard, be lacking something, and fail to comply with the poetic. In the history of thinking, there has long been a distinction between mere negation and deprivation. It remains open to further consideration whether, this distinction in place (one that required Plato’s utmost intellectual efforts to disentangle in his Sophist), the question concerning the “not” has now been sufficiently settled.
We can only learn how to understand the “un” in “unpoetic” in the present case if we succeed in more precisely determining the “poetic”. Fortunately, Hölderlin himself provides the type of assistance we need.
The word “unpoetic” only occurs once in the preserved manuscripts of Hölderlin. Hellingrath’s “Appendix” (IV, 392) records the term’s variants, and comments: “just above the occurrence of unpoetic, the following variants are [218] listed on top of one another: infinite, unpeaceful, unbounded, unrestrained.”
7. For comparison of “Das Nächste Beste” see Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Hymns and Fragments, 174-175 and 274-275; and Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, 544-545.