Wilhelm Waiblinger (21 November 1804 – 17 or 30 January 1830) was a German romantic poet, mostly remembered today in connection with Friedrich Hölderlin. After he had attended Gymnasium Illustre in Stuttgart, he was a student at the seminary of Tübingen in the 1820s, when Hölderlin, already mentally ill, lived there as a recluse in a carpenter's house. Waiblinger, who used to visit the older poet and take him out for walks, left an account of Hölderlin's life then, Hölderlins Leben, Dichtung und Wahnsinn ("Hölderlin's life, poetry and madness"). In the late 1820s, Waiblinger left Tübingen for Italy, dying in Rome at the age of 25.
In his short story "Im Presselschen Gartenhaus" ("In Pressel’s Garden-house", 1913), Hermann Hesse gives a touching picture of a visit to Hölderlin by Waiblinger and the poet Eduard Mörike, both young theology students in Tübingen, like Hölderlin himself decades before.
Read more about Wilhelm Waiblinger: Bibliography
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“Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)