Without exaggeration one might say that Shelton paints a whole, new picture of Hoelderlin in his monograph. He is the first writer to present the young Hoelderlin, not of the viewpoint of his later works, but objectively and unprejudiced. He makes use of the sources to reveal the young man, the student he was in this period of his life. The result is the first Hoelderlin biography that is free of grafted-on concepts and hindsight in interpretation, of falsifications that arise from seeing Hoelderlin from a certain angle and interpreting his works according to preconceived notions.