The thirty hymns of The Hlderliniae are inspired by the intricacies and transcendent humanity of Beethoven's last quartets. Nathaniel Tarn's new book opens with a biographical note on the "Poet of Poets," Friedrich Hlderlin, setting the scene and introducing the doomed love of the poet's life, Diotima; it ends in the Neckar River, the river of Hlderlin's birth and death. Through affairs of love and polity, Tarn speaks through Hlderlin, and Hlderlin speaks through Tarn. The French Revolution--which Hlderlin supported passionately until the Reign of Terror--illuminates our war-torn, ecologically precarious age, as the failures of our age recall those past tragedies. Line after line carries Hlderlin's hope in an ideal of a poetry that can englobe all the mind's disciplines and make a universe of its own.