“Words like Flowers”: Vital Materialism in Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” and Schelling’s Ages of the World

Friedrich Hölderlin’s elegy “Brod und Wein” (Bread and Wine) includes a simile that compares words to flowers. Paul De Man performs a semiotic critique of the simile in his well-known essay, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image.” For De Man, Hölderlin’s elegy wants to seduce us into assenting to the illogical notion that human language can spring into existence spontaneously, just as flowers spring up from the ground. I attempt to read against the grain of De Man’s critique by focusing attention on the elegy’s discursive imbrication within Romantic-era vital materialism to which Hölderlin was committed. To perform this reading I turn to Friedrich Schelling’s unfinished Ages of the World (1811–15), arguing that its articulation of vital materialism helps to delineate and support a materialist rather than a semiotic reading of Hölderlin’s simile, connecting and contrasting Schelling’s ideas with twenty-first century New Materialism.