Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock Biography

Dromo's Den

KLOPSTOCK, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724-1803). A German poet of great fame and popularity in the latter half of the eighteenth century, now hardly read or readable. He was one of the pioneers of the classic age. He was born in Quedlinburg, July 2, 1724, and died in Hamburg, March 14, 1803. Educated at Quedlinburg and the famous school at Schulpforta, Klopstock went in 1745 to Jena to study theology, but left, in 1746 for Leipzig, where he made the acquaintance of Gellert (q.v.). Going then as private tutor to Langensalza, in 1748 he published the first three cantos of Der Messias, intended to be a Miltonic epic, but really only a series of lyric outbursts, and so won the attention of Bodmer (q.v.), the translator of Milton, who invited him in 1750 to Zurich. Thence he went in 1751 to Copenhagen by invitation of the Danish King, who gave him a yearly pension of 400 thalers. Political changes brought him back to Germany in 1771, and he remained there, chiefly in Hamburg, where he finished the Messias in 1773, till his death.

Klopstock wrote also odes, many of which are admirable, an artificial Art of Poetry (Die Gelehrtenrepublik, 1744); Bardiete, antiquated in patriotism and obsolete in mythology, interspersed with unactable dramas (Hermannsschlacht, 1769; Hermann und die Fürstcn, 1784; and Hermannes Tod, 1787), all sentimental and overwrought. Though Klopstock's contributions to German thought and poetry were not small, his enrichment of the poetic vocabulary, his attention to prosody, and his making poetry the vehicle of genuine feeling were of greater service to the poets that immediately followed him. He banished rhyme and tried to introduce Germanic mythology into German literature. Klopstock's Works were first collected in 12 volumes (Leipzig, 1798-1817). One of the best editions is that edited by Muncker (4 vols., 1887) . There is an English translation of the Messias that does fair justice to the nebulous earnestness of the original. Consult: Muncker, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Geschichte seines Lebens and seiner Schriften (2d ed., Berlin, 1900); K. Heinemann, Klopstocks Leben and Werke (1890); Bailly, Etude sur la vie et les œuvres de Klopstock (1888); Lyon, Ueber Klopstocks Verhältnis zu Goethe (Leipzig, 1882); Lappenberg, Briefe von und an Klopstock (Brunswick, 1867); E. Schmidt, Charakteristeken, vol. i (1886); Jenny, Miltons Einfluss auf die deutsche Litteratur (1890); Häbler, Milton und Klopstock (1893).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 287-288.