Not Rhythm

This chapter explores the concept of rhythm in Hölderlin. It opens by asking why scholars have been quick to identify the gnomic ‘Everything is rhythm’ as a key tenet of Hölderlin’s poetics despite the fact that he never penned the line and may well never have said it. In an effort to elucidate Hölderlin’s understanding of rhythmic and counter-rhythmic interruptions, the discussion turns to ‘Voice of the People’ and ‘Germanien’, where the negative operator nicht threatens to expose any given verbal formation as contingent rather than necessary. In these poems, rhythm is never reducible to a single schema but instead manifests as the expression of multiple – possible and impossible – patterns. In this respect, Hölderlin’s notion of rhythm is a return to the Ancient Greek conception of rhuthmos, which names less a predictable series of changes than a volatile, protean form.