Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) was the first modern German poet and the forerunner of Goethe. Klopstock's Iyrical poetry reveals the timelessness of his great genius.

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was born at Quedlinburg in Lower Saxony on July 2, 1724. From 1739 to 1745 he attended the Protestant School of Schulpforta, renowned for sound training in classics; from autumn 1745 to Easter 1746 he went to Jena University; and from Easter 1746 to 1748 he studied theology at Leipzig University.

The first three cantos of Klopstock's Messias (inspired by John Milton) appeared in 1748 in the fourth volume of the Bremer Beiträge. Messiasis a landmark in modern German writing: It destroyed Johann Christoph Gottsched's supremacy; it opened a new literary movement; and it made Klopstock world-famous.

Though Klopstock was not the first to strike a passionately lyrical and religious note in modern German poetry, he, with the proud surety of a born genius, ennobled the new High German lyrical language and hexametric verse form with dignity, grandeur, lofty themes, and emotions. Not since the days of Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg (perhaps with the exception of Johann Christian Günther) had a German poet felt the divine mission of his creative work so intensely. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Book X of Poetry and Truth, refers to the miraculous ascendancy of Klopstock as the author of the Messias and the "enthusiastic" odes. Klopstock's hexameters are not based on quantitative meter but are almost naturally adapted to German speech. His fragment Ü ber Sprache und Dichtkunst deals with the peculiar nature of the hexameter, by no means alien to German expression.

From 1748 to 1750 Klopstock was a tutor in Langensalza. From July 1750 to February 1751 he was Johann Jakob Bodmer's guest in Switzerland. Since they had little in common, a breach in their friendship was unavoidable.

In 1750 Klopstock composed the ode Der Zürchersee. This poem is not only enthusiastic feeling or description or meditation; all those expressions are blended into a unique artistic entity which mysteriously hovers between nature description and lyrical emotion and which foreshadows Goethe's dynamic Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) language.

After leaving Switzerland, Klopstock went to Quedlinburg, Hamburg, and finally Copenhagen (1751-1770) at the invitation of the Germanophile Danish king Frederick V. During these years he wrote Der Tod Adams (1757); Vaterländische Oden (1764-1768); volumes 1, 2, and 3 (altogether 15 cantos) of the Messias; and Hermanns Schlacht (1769), one of three semidramatic scenes (Bardiete) dealing with the destiny of Arminius. The other two Bardiete were Hermann und die Fürsten (1784) and Hermanns Tod (1787). In 1754 he married Meta Möller, who died 4 years later.

The grandiose dithyramb Die Frühlingsfeier, a lyrical rendering of a tempest, was originally composed in "free verse" (spring 1759). Goethe refers to it in Werther (letter of June 16). As in the Zürchersee ode, here, too, is a happy blending of reflection, lyrical emotion, and biblical images in the dynamic language of Sturm und Drang. In the end, heaven and earth unite in a mystic union, and the rainbow of peace rises over the horizon. These two poems mentioned are among the most inspired lyrical expressions in the German language.

The year 1773 witnessed the publication of Gottfried August Bürger's Lenore, Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen, and Johann Gottfried von Herder's edition of Von deutscher Art und Kunst. By the time the complete Messias (20 cantos, 1773) and Die deutsche Gelehrten-Republik (1774), based on a plan for the foundation of an academy of science, appeared, Klopstock had outlived his own fame.

From 1770 to 1803 Klopstock lived in Hamburg. After enthusiastically becoming an honorary French citizen in 1792 and at first intensely welcoming the French Revolution, he became disappointed and shocked by its aftermath. Klopstock died in Hamburg on March 14, 1803.

Further Reading

Klopstock is discussed in August Closs, The Genius of the German Lyric (1938; 2d ed. rev. 1962); Siegbert Salomon Prawer, German Lyric Poetry: A Critical Analysis of Selected Poems from Klopstock to Rilke (1952); and Richard Kuehnemund, Arminius, or the Rise of a National Symbol in Literature, from Hutten to Grabbe (1953). Recommended for background are Jethro Bithel, ed., Germany: A Companion to German Studies (1932; 5th ed. rev. 1955); Werner P. Friederich, An Outline-history of German Literature (1948; 2d ed. 1961); H. B. Garland, Storm and Stress (1952); Eric Albert Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700-1775 (1959); and Ernest L. Stahl and W. E. Yuill, eds., Introductions to German Literature, vol. 3: German Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries (1970).

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlob (Quedlinburg, 1724-1803, Ottensen nr. Hamburg), was educated (1739-45) at Schulpforta (see Fürstenschulen), where he received a sound classical training and was influenced by Pietistic ways of thought (see Pietismus). Here he became acquainted with Milton's Paradise Lost and resolved to write a great religious epic, an intention which he expressed in his passing-out speech. He studied briefly at Jena (1745-6) and then migrated to Halle (1746-8). In 1748 the first three cantos of his religious epic Der Messias were published in the Bremer Beiträge. The poem, of which the twentieth and last canto did not appear until 1773, is written in classical hexameters; its combination of stylistic originality and religious subject-matter quickly forged for Klopstock a nation-wide reputation as a poetic genius of extraordinary promise. From 1748 to 1750 he was a private tutor to his cousins in Langensalza, and during this time he fell in love with a cousin of another branch of the family, Marie Sophie Schmidt, whom he idealized in odes as Fanny. Fanny did not return his passion. The odes, which he began to write in 1747 and continued to compose all his life, constitute his most original and persisting achievement. Klopstock's reputation as a seraphic singer of the Messiah won him an invitation to visit J. J. Bodmer in Zurich, but the acquaintance soon led to disillusionment, probably on both sides. Certainly Klopstock proved more normal than Bodmer had supposed, and was not only addicted to manly sports, but liked the company of young women. His ode ‘Der Zürcher See’ (1750) commemorates, in lofty idealization, a boating picnic in mixed company.

In 1751 Klopstock was invited to Copenhagen by King Frederick V at the instigation of Count Bernstorff and received a pension which continued throughout his life. In 1754 he married Meta Moller (see below); their happy marriage was terminated in 1758 by her death in childbirth. In his middle years Klopstock wrote his first play, Der Tod Adams (1757); it was followed some years later by Salomo (1769) and David (1772). An attempt at hymn-writing (Geistliche Lieder, 1758, second volume 1769) produced religious poems, but no singable hymns for liturgical use. While in Copenhagen Klopstock expressed his growing interest in the German past in the first of his patriotic historical plays, to which he applied the term Bardiet, Hermanns Schlacht (1769), to which he later added Hermann und die Fürsten (1784) and Hermanns Tod (1787).

In 1770 the fall of his patron Count Bernstorff and the latter's replacement by the free-thinker Count J. F. Struensee (1731-72) led Klopstock to leave Denmark and settle in Hamburg. Soon afterwards the first collected publication of his odes (Oden, 1771) renewed his influence upon the younger generation, especially the circle around the young Goethe in Strasburg and Frankfurt, and even more upon the group of young poets and enthusiasts in Göttingen (see Göttinger Hainbund). In 1774 Klopstock visited Karlsruhe (taking in Göttingen on his way) at the invitation of Margrave Karl Friedrich von Baden. This journey, on which he was much lionized, marked the zenith of his influence. His Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774) is an account of a fictitious ideal state in which poets and thinkers come into their own. Klopstock also wrote a tract on spelling reform (Über die deutsche Rechtschreibung, 1778), as well as short works on language, many of which contain stimulating and fruitful ideas (e.g. Grammatische Gespräche, 1794). His later odes are mostly concerned with political themes, including the French Revolution, which Klopstock at first supported with enthusiasm, only to turn away as the Terror developed.

In his own day Klopstock's reputation rested first upon Der Messias, and then on the odes. His remarkable lyric gifts were not matched with the sustained plastic imagination necessary for a long epic poem, and so the focus has gradually shifted to his lyric poetry in which he is a bold and original manipulator of language with a remarkable, though sometimes exaggerated, power to fix in monumental terms even the fleeting and evanescent. He has been variously regarded as the originator of a new age in poetry, as a late culmination of baroque, and as a rather boring Historical Figure. Nevertheless, the best of the odes, including long poems such as ‘Der Zürcher See’ and ‘Die Frühlingsfeier’ (1759), and shorter ones like ‘Die frühen Gräber’ (1764) and ‘Die Sommernacht’ (1766), can hold their own in almost any company.

Gesammelte Werke (4 vols.), ed. F. Muncker, appeared 1887. Werke und Briefe, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (c.36 vols.), ed. H. Gronemeyer, E. Höpker-Herberg, K. Hurlebusch, and R.-M. Hurlebusch, began publication in 1974 (Hamburger Ausgabe). Briefwechsel zwischen Klopstock und den Grafen Christian und Friedrich Leopold Stolberg (see Stolberg, C. and F. L.), ed. J. Behrens, to which correspondence with Herder, ed. S. Jodeleit, is appended, appeared in 1964.

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724–1803), German poet. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was the oldest of seventeen children born into an impoverished Pietist family of attorneys and pastors in Quedlinburg (Saxony-Anhalt). After receiving a humanistic education at the princely college in Schulpforta, he studied theology and philosophy at the universities of Jena and Leipzig, where he began writing the first songs of his monumental religious epic Der Messias (The Messiah; published in 4 volumes between 1748 and 1773, final version in 1799/1800). In 1751, he accepted an invitation from the Danish king, Frederick V, who sponsored the completion of the Messias. Shortly after his arrival in Denmark, Klopstock married Margarethe (Meta) Moller from Hamburg, the "Cidli" of his odes, who died four years later. After living in Denmark for almost twenty years, Klopstock resided in Hamburg for the rest of his life, married his first wife's niece, the widow Johanne Elisabeth von Winthem, and published poems, plays, and theoretical writings on German literature, language, and culture.

Klopstock became one of the most celebrated poets of his time and revolutionized German poetic language and its function within the theoretical debate about the possibility of a German national culture. Inspired by Johann Jakob Bodmer's and Johann Jakob Breitinger's literary theory of the poetic use of imagination, he rejected the dominant German aesthetic theory, the rationalist poetics of Johann Christoph Gottsched with its rigid literary conventions. Klopstock aspired to create a new poetry that could live up to the stylistic qualities of masterpieces such as Homer's Iliad or John Milton's Paradise Lost. His vision of the poet as "genius" or prophetic "creator" rather than "imitator" of nature led to the invention of a new lyrical language. Written in classical hexameters instead of the traditional German alternating verse forms, the first three cantos of the Messias signaled a departure from grammatical and syntactical rules and introduced an innovative, complex style. The pathetic use of inversions, repetitions, neologisms, comparisons, and metaphors infused enthusiasm, passion, and sentiment into the biblical story. In this way Klopstock transformed the culture of religious dogma into an inner world of sensitive experience. Although composed and perceived as a devotional work, the Messias evoked readers' or listeners' emotional responses and let them experience the religious sublime through the new aesthetic form. In his following poems, odes of enthusiasm, patriotic hymns, and elegies, Klopstock continued his formal experiments and was the first to introduce free verse into German poetry. His search for an emotional and yet sacred poetic language that manifested the experiences of the inner self combined expressive subjectivity with poetic autonomy and resulted in the interdependence of the secular and the spiritual. In this way, Klopstock instilled religious pathos into the poetic representation of friendship, nature, love, leisure, and the nation.

While Klopstock wrote spiritual songs (Geistliche Lieder [1757, 1769]), and religious and patriotic tragedies (Der Tod Adams [1757; The death of Adam] and David [1772]), his most influential work was probably the play Hermanns Schlacht (1769; The battle of Arminius). However, it did not receive the same attention as his poetic work—after all, Klopstock and the Messias had become synonyms. His collection of theoretical and fictional texts, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774; The German Republic of Letters) added a new dimension to his publications. This utopian historiography of a German national culture in the making launched the idea that national identity could be generated through shared values and transmitted by cultural artifacts and institutions. Drawing on Greek ideals, Klopstock envisioned a German republic in which the humanist tradition would unite political and cultural and public and private spheres. While the esoteric montage of different text genres did not receive the same attention as the Messias, its form of dissemination was quite remarkable in the history of publishing. Being concerned to receive fair compensation as an author, Klopstock circumvented the established book trade through publishers and booksellers by advertising his work via subscription and successfully launched a new means of profitable distribution.

Klopstock's contemporaries celebrated him as Germany's national poet. His poetic focus on feeling and experience influenced the young poets of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Friedrich Hölderlin praised him as Germany's leading lyric poet, and the Romantics embraced his cultural patriotism. Klopstock's poetic legacy was soon surpassed by that of Goethe, who dominated Germany's cultural landscape throughout the nineteenth century, and it was not until the twentieth century that German poets and authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Arno Schmidt, and Peter Rühmkorf rediscovered the power of Klopstock's lyrical voice. Recent scholarship has established a continuing interest in Klopstock through the production of a historical-critical edition of his works.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb. Werke und Briefe: Historischkritische Ausgabe. Edited by Horst Gronemeyer et al. Berlin and New York, 1974–.

Swales, Martin, ed. German Poetry: An Anthology from Klopstock to Enzensberger. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1987.

Secondary Sources

Hilliard, Kevin. Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts in Klopstock's Thought. London, 1987.

Hilliard, Kevin, and Katrin Kohl, eds. Klopstock an der Grenze der Epochen. Mit Klopstock-Bibliographie 1972–1992. Berlin and New York, 1995.

Kohl, Katrin M. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Stuttgart, 2000.

——. Rhetoric, the Bible, and the Origins of Free Verse: The Early "Hymns" of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Berlin and New York, 1990.

Lee, Meredith. Displacing Authority: Goethe's Poetic Reception of Klopstock. Heidelberg, 1999.

—STEPHAN K. SCHINDLER

Quotes:

"He who has an opinion of his own, but depends upon the opinion and taste of others, is a slave."

This article relies largely or entirely upon a single source. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations of additional sources. (January 2009)

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Painting by Johann Caspar Füssli (1750)
Born	July 2, 1724(1724-07-02) Quedlinburg, Germany
Died	March 14, 1803 (aged 78) Hamburg, Germany

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (IPA: [ˈklɔpʃtɔk]) (July 2, 1724 – March 14, 1803) was a German poet.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Assessment 3 Bibliography 4 External links

Biography

Klopstock was born at Quedlinburg, the eldest son of a lawyer.

Both in his birthplace and on the estate of Friedeburg on the Saale, which his father later rented, young Klopstock passed a happy childhood; and more attention having been given to his physical than to his mental development he grew up a strong healthy boy and was an excellent horseman. In his thirteenth year Klopstock returned to Quedlinburg where he attended the gymnasium, and in 1739 proceeded to the famous classical school of Schulpforta. Here he soon became an adept in Greek and Latin versification, and wrote some meritorious idylls and odes in German. His original intention of making Henry the Fowler the hero of an epic, was, under the influence of Milton's Paradise Lost with which he became acquainted through Bodmer's translation, abandoned in favour of the religious epic.

While yet at school, he had already drafted the plan of Der Messias, upon which his fame mainly rests. On September 21, 1745 he delivered on quitting school a remarkable "leaving oration" on epic poetry--Abschiedsrede über die epische Poesie, kultur- und literargeschichtlich erläutert--and next proceeded to Jena as a student of theology, where he elaborated the first three cantos of the Messias in prose. The life at this university being uncongenial to him, he removed in the spring of 1746 to Leipzig, and here joined the circle of young men of letters who contributed to the Bremer Beiträge. In this periodical the first three cantos of the Messias in hexameters were anonymously published in 1748.

A new era in German literature had commenced, and the name of the author soon became known. In Leipzig he also wrote a number of odes, the best known of which is An meine Freunde (1747), afterwards recast as Wingolf (1767). He left the university in 1748 and became a private tutor in the family of a relative at Langensalza. Here unrequited love for a cousin (the "Fanny" of his odes) disturbed his peace of mind. Gladly therefore he accepted in 1750 an invitation from Bodmer, the translator of Paradise Lost, to visit him in Zürich. Here Klopstock was at first treated with every kindness and respect and rapidly recovered his spirits. Bodmer, however, was disappointed to find in the young poet of the Messias a man of strong worldly interests, and a coolness sprang up between the two friends.

At this juncture Klopstock received from Frederick V of Denmark, on the recommendation of his minister Count von Bernstorff (1712-1772), an invitation to settle at Copenhagen, with an annuity of 400 thalers, with a view to the completion of the Messias. The offer was accepted; on his way to the Danish capital Klopstock met at Hamburg the lady who in 1754 became his wife, Margareta (Meta) Möller, (the "Cidli" of his odes), an enthusiastic admirer of his poetry. His happiness was short; she died in 1758, leaving him almost broken-hearted. His grief at her loss finds pathetic expression in the fifteenth canto of the Messias.

The poet subsequently published his wife's writings, Hinterlassene Werke von Margareta Klopstock (1759), which give evidence of a tender, sensitive and deeply religious spirit. Klopstock now relapsed into melancholy; new ideas failed him, and his poetry became more and more vague and unintelligible. He still continued to live and work at Copenhagen, and next, following Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, turned his attention to northern mythology, which he conceived should replace classical subjects in a new school of German poetry. In 1770, on the dismissal by King Christian VII of Count Bernstorff from office, he retired with the latter to Hamburg, but retained his pension together with the rank of councillor of legation.

Here, in 1773, he issued the last five cantos of the Messias. In the following year he published his strange scheme for the regeneration of German letters, Die Gelehrtenrepublik (1774). In 1775 he travelled south, and making the acquaintance of Goethe on the way, spent a year at the court of the margrave of Baden at Karlsruhe. Thence, in 1776, with the title of Hofrath and a pension from the margrave, which he retained together with that from the king of Denmark, he returned to Hamburg where he spent the remainder of his life. His latter years he passed, as had always been his inclination, in retirement, only occasionally relieved by association with his most intimate friends, busied with philological studies, and hardly interesting himself in the new developments of German literature. The American War of Independence and the Revolution in France aroused him, however, to enthusiasm. The French Republic sent him the diploma of honorary citizenship; but, horrified at the terrible scenes the Revolution had enacted in the place of liberty, he returned it. When sixty-seven years of age he contracted a second marriage with Johanna Elisabeth von Winthem, a widow and a niece of his late wife, who for many years had been one of his most intimate friends. He died at Hamburg on 14 March 1803, mourned by all Germany, and was buried with great pomp and ceremony by the side of his first wife in the churchyard of the village of Ottensen.

Assessment

Klopstock's nature was best attuned to lyrical poetry, and in it his deep, noble character found its truest expression. He was less suited for epic and dramatic representation; for, wrapt up in himself, a stranger to the outer world, without historical culture, and without even any interest in the events of his time, he was lacking in the art of plastic representation such as a great epic requires. Thus the Messias, despite the magnificent passages which especially the earlier cantos contain, cannot satisfy the demands such a theme must necessarily make. The subject matter, the Redemption, presented serious difficulties to adequate epic treatment. The Gospel story was too scanty, and what might have been imported from without and interwoven with it was rejected by the author as profane. He had accordingly to resort to Christian mythology; and here again, circumscribed by the dogmas of the Church, he was in danger of trespassing on the fundamental truths of the Christian faith. The personality of Christ could scarcely be treated in an individual form, still less could angels and devils; and in the case of God Himself it was impossible. The result was that, despite the groundwork--the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Revelation of St John, and the model ready to hand in Milton's Paradise Lost--material elements are largely wanting and the actors in the poem, divine and human, lack plastic form. That the poem took twenty-five years to complete could not but be detrimental to its unity of design; the original enthusiasm was not sustained until the end, and the earlier cantos are far superior to the latter.

Thus the intense public interest the work aroused in its commencement had almost vanished before its completion. It was translated into seventeen languages and led to numerous imitations. In his odes Klopstock had more scope for his peculiar talent. Among the best are An Fanny; Der Zürchersee; Die tote Klarissa; An Cidli; Die beiden Musen; Der Rheinwein; Die frühen Gräber, Mein Vaterland. His religious odes mostly take the form of hymns, of which the most beautiful is Die Frühlingsfeier. His dramas, in some of which, notably Hermanns Schlacht (1769) and Hermann und die Fürsten (1784), he celebrated the deeds of the ancient German hero Arminius, and in others, Der Tod Adams (1757) and Salomo (1764), took his materials from the Old Testament; are essentially lyrical in character and deficient in action. In addition to Die Gelehrtenrepublik, he was also the author of Fragmente über Sprache und Dichtkunst (1779) and Grammatische Gespräche (1794), works in which he made important contributions to philology and to the history of German poetry.

Bibliography

Klopstock's Werke first appeared in seven quarto volumes (1798-1809). At the same time a more complete edition in twelve octavo volumes was published (1798-1817), to which six additional volumes were added in 1830. Other nineteenth-century editions were published in 1844-1845, 1854-1855, 1879 (ed. by R Boxberger), 1884 (ed. by R Hamel) and 1893 (a selection edited by F Muncker). A critical edition of the Odes was published by F Muncker and J Pawel in 1889; a commentary on these by H Düntzer (1860; 2nd ed., 1878). He immortalized his 1750's visit at the Swiss Au peninsula in his „Ode an den Zürichsee“ (Ode to the Lake Zurich).

For Klopstock's correspondence see:

• K Schmidt, Klopstock und seine Freunde (1810);
• CAH Clodius, Klopstocks Nachlass (1821);
• J.M. Lappenberg, Briefe von und an Klopstock (1867).

Cf. further

• Carl Friedrich Cramer, Klopstock, Er und über ihn (1780-1792);
• J.G. Gruber, Klopstocks Leben (1832);
• R Hamel, Klopstock-Studien (1879-1880);
• F Muncker, F. G. Klopstock, the most authoritative biography, (1888);
• E Bailly, Étude sur la vie et les oeuvres de Klopstock (Paris, 1888).

External links

• Works by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock at Project Gutenberg
• Klopstock's poems

---

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Klopstock, Gottlieb Friedrich.

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Persondata
NAME	Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German poet
DATE OF BIRTH	July 2, 1724
PLACE OF BIRTH	Quedlinburg, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	March 14, 1803
PLACE OF DEATH	Hamburg, Germany

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)