Il compito del poeta. Influenze neokantiane nel saggio "Due poesie di Friedrich Hölderlin" (1914-15) di Walter Benjamin.

The death of the poet and the courage for this death are the center of Hölderlin's two poems (Dichtermut and Blödigkeit) which Benjamin analyzes in the essay Two poems by Friedrich Hölderlin and which considers two different versions (respectively the first and the second) of the same poetry. The analysis that Benjamin makes of these poems, an "aesthetic comment" that wants to have a philosophical method as its basis, reveals strong neo-Kantian influences. Benjamin indicates the method of an aesthetic comment in the determination of the poetic task, that is, in the explication of the spiritual-intuitive structure of the poem (Gedicht) as its a priori presupposition. He therefore considers the definition of the method preliminary to the aesthetic commentary, aware of the fact that the centrality of the method, as a "transcendental method" is a characteristic of Cohen's thought, for which philosophy must start from experience but on the other hand it must investigate the conditions of possibility of experience itself, such as the Faktum of science, and, analogously, he must investigate, starting from the Fakta of law and art, their conditions of possibility in ethics and aesthetics.