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A recurring theme in Rochelle Tobias's work is the relationship between poetry and the world, in particular nature. She draws on literary theorists and philosophers like Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe, or Husserl to explore what she understands as the epistemological and formative function of poetry in relation to nature ("Ecology" and "Mythology;" see Khan in this issue). At the same time, Tobias seeks to avoid taking idealist or constructivist positions that limit our concepts, perceptions, or sensations of the outside world to expressions of our own cognitive or physical makeup, and that reduce poetic images of nature to linguistic or social constructions. Instead, she is sympathetic to Schelling's natural philosophy, which maintains that consciousness is present in nature itself ("Introduction" 1), and, in particular, to Hölderlin's addendum that nature needs poetry to formulate its consciousness:
Poetry is necessary for nature not only to appear but also to be thought. This represents Hölderlin's contribution to the tradition of natural philosophy and to the theory and practice of the lyric.
("Introduction" 1)
Hölderlin's understanding of nature as consciousness and of poetry as the expression, or even realization of this consciousness, contributes, in Tobias's view, found in the introduction to her recent edited volume on Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature (2020), not only to the "tradition of natural philosophy" but also to "contemporary environmental thought in an age of crisis" (15). She argues that Hölderlin, like environmental theorists, insists on the inseparability of natural and human history and believes that both co-evolve, in a relationship that is characterized by conflicting, productive and destructive forces. On the one hand, nature performs a "cycle of appearing and disappearing," on the other hand, it has an "impulse toward formlessness," which Hölderlin calls "the aorgic" and which humans counter, in turn, with their formative power.1 While Tobias does not explicitly relate nature's consciousness to its conflicting structure, it seems plausible that the latter is an expression of the former—of nature's self-reflection, which requires that it differentiates itself into contrasting elements. According to Tobias, Hölderlin shows that the ecological crisis has its roots in a philosophically necessary relationship of nature toward itself and toward humans.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth—Hölderlin was born in 1770 and died in 1843—his work speaks...