Hölderlin trained as a theologian at the university of Tübingen where he met Schelling and Hegel. In his novel Hyperion (1797/99), Hölderlin venerated the sacred aspects of nature, and attempted to unite religion and art as ‘overseers of reason’. But his interest to philosophy derives not from any theory or doctrine, but from his influence on a variety of thinkers from Schiller to Heidegger. He epitomizes the poet as youthful, idealistic, Romantic, blessed with superior knowledge, and above all as someone standing ‘bare-headed beneath God’s thunderstorms’, midway between the Gods and man, and so inevitably doomed. He became incurably but harmlessly insane in 1807.