Klopstock
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803)Klopstock is the major German poet of the mid-eighteenth century. His free, unrhymed verse resists previous conventions, containing much formal innovation. His epic poem Der Messias; The Messiah was inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was published in four volumes (vol. 1 in 1751, vol. 2 in 1755, vol. 3 in 1768 and vol. 4 in 1773). He also published a major prose work, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik; The German Republic of Letters (1774) about a society of authors.
His poetry and theoretical writings influenced the next generation of poets including Goethe.
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/5224/35
In this poem, moonlit contemplation gives way to the dawn of a spring day, which brings painful insights. In the last two lines of this poem, the caesura serves to emphasise the gulf between the poet and those he mourns, and the final words of the clauses set up an opposition: the lyric 'I' is bound to the day, but the deceased are bound to the night.
Further Reading in English
Eric A. Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language 1700-1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), Chapter 10: ‘The Grand Manner’
Robert M. Browning, German Poetry in the Age of Enlightenment: From Brockes to Klopstock (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1978)
Kevin Hilliard, ‘What the Seer Saw: Klopstock’s Journey to Switzerland in 1750’, Modern Language Review 81 (1986), 655-65
Kevin Hilliard, Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts in Klopstock’s Thought (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1987)
Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz, ‘Aesthetics of the Holy. Functions of Space in Milton and Klopstock’, Oxford German Studies 47:4 (2018), 417-38
Katrin M. Kohl, Rhetoric, the Bible, and the origins of free verse: the early ‘hymns’ of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990)
Katrin M. Kohl, ‘“Wir wollen weniger erhaben und fleissiger gelesen sein”: Klopstock’s Sublime Aspirations and their Role in the Development of German Poetry’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 60 (1991), 39-62
Roger Paulin, ‘Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “Der Zürchersee”’, in Landmarks in German Poetry, ed. by Peter Hutchinson (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 41-56
S. S. Prawer, German Lyric Poetry: A Critical Analysis of Selected Poems from Klopstock to Rilke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 36-43
Further Reading in German
K. F. Hilliard, ‘Klopstock in den Jahren 1764 bis 1770. Metrische Erfindung und die Wiedergeburt der Dichtung aus dem Geiste des Eislaufs’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 33 (1989), 145-84
K. F. Hilliard and Katrin Kohl (eds.), Klopstock an der Grenze der Epochen (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1995)
K. F. Hilliard, ‘Schweigen und Benennen bei Klopstock und anderen Dichtern’, in Das Erhabene in der Dichtung: Klopstock und die Folgen, Schriftenreihe des Klopstock-Hauses Quedlinburg, 1 (Halle: Verlag Janos Stekovics 1997), pp. 13-32
Karl Mickel, Gelehrtenrepublik. Aufsätze und Studien (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), pp. 11-16, 20-44