Without exaggeration one might say that Shelton paints a whole, new picture of Hölderlin in his monograph. He is the first writer to present the young Hölderlin, 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 Hölderlin biography that is free of grafted-on concepts and hindsight in interpretation, of falsifications that arise from seeing Hölderlin from a certain angle and interpreting his works according to preconceived notions.