Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (* July 2nd 1724 with; † March 14th 1803 with Hamburg) was a German Poète .

Its life

After having attended the college of, it entered at the 16 years age to (college-boarding school of reputation, which accommodated in particular Friedrich Nietzsche and August Ferdinand Möbius). In 1745, it began its studies of Théologie to Iéna, and carried out a first outline of Messias, which it initially wrote in prose. The following year, with Leipzig, it rewrote its work in decasyllables, whose publication of the first part created sensation. It is there too that it composed its first Ode S. Its studies of theology completed, Klopstock became tutor (following the example all applicants in theology), with. During two years which its stay with Langensalza lasted, Klopstock knew the passion love in turn, then the disappointment and finally the pain of the renouncement with a named young girl Marie-Sophie: this led it, during these two years, to compose most beautiful of its first odes on the inaccessible love.

The publication of these odes started a wind of enthusiasm in all Germany: it was the hour of glory of pure poetry.

It made then knowledge with Johann Jakob Bodmer, which invited it to Zurich: it made the voyage in 1750. Eight month later, Klopstock left to the Denmark on the invitation the king Frederic V, whose support enabled him to complete its work, and where it spent three years of his life.

In 1754, he married Margarete Moller, girl of a merchant of Hamburg, but she died four years later. Thirty years later, its memory still haunted it and he sang the praises in his elegies of them. It was only at one advanced age (67 years) that it remaria with the hambourgeoise Johanna Elisabeth von Winthem.

From 1759 to 1762, Klopstock lived with Quedlinburg, Brunswick and], then with Copenhagen, where it remained until 1771. In addition to Messias , which appeared in its entirety only in 1773, he wrote dramas, as the Hermannsschlacht (in French the Bataille of Teutobourg ). He settled then with Hamburg, promoted with the row of advising Danish legation; in 1776, it went temporarily to Karlsruhe on the invitation of the count Karl Friedrich von Baden. Klopstock seems the creator of the Erlebnisdichtung , i.e. of the poetry of lived, the experiment , and the German Irrationalisme, and like the father of the theory of the State-nation. Klopstock was a partisan of the French revolution (cf in particular the poem of 1789 " Kennet euch selbst" - you know yourself - in which it describes the French revolution like " the noblest act of the siècle" and exhorts the Germans with the revolution thus), but nevertheless later excesses (in the poem " fustigated some; Die Jacobiner" - the Jacobins - of 1792, with which he criticizes the mode of the Jacobins, resulting from the French revolution, comparing it with a snake which undulates through France). To have sung the praises, in its Odes, of the French revolution, one decreed the title of French citizen to him; he returned it thereafter, in reaction vis-a-vis the atrocities made supposedly in the name of freedom.

Klopstock is famous to be one of the precursors of the German literary movement Sturm und Drang ( storm and dash ).

The enlightened republic of Klopstock was a concept which entrusted the capacity to a cultivated elite (enlightened), and not with a sovereignty considered as incompetent to reign. The intellectuals, élitistes, rise thus above the people, affublant it of the scorning term of " rabble ". Klopstock does not grant any sovereignty to the people, and there remain nothing any more the values of " Freedom, Equality, Fraternity " (cf the poem " Fürstenlob" - Praises with the sovereigns )…

Its work

'' Der Messias '' (epopee of 22.000 worms), appeared since 1748 in several editions. Translated into French by Mrs. de Carlowitz in 1853, under the title Messiade .
Geistliche Dichtung (spiritual poetry), which one still nowadays finds in certain hymns, such as for example:

Die ihr Christi Jünger seid (you who are disciples of Christ)
Herr, of the wollst ones vorbereiten (Lord you want to prepare us)

Études on the language (attempt at a reform of the writing):

Splits up über Sprache und Dichtkunst (fragments on the language and the art of poetry)
Grammatische Gespräche (grammatical dialogs)

Bonds

(Wikiquote) Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (German quotations)
Digitalization of the odes, 1750
secondary Literature on Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock In: Universitätsbibliothek DER FU Berlin
Gutenberg Project (in German)

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