Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock

German poet

• Born: July 2, 1724
• Birthplace: Quedlinburg, Saxony (now in Germany)
• Died: March 14, 1803
• Place of death: Hamburg (now in Germany)

Klopstock’s writings mark the transition from the classical ideas and practices of the early eighteenth century in Germany to those of the Sturm und Drang and Romantic movements at century’s end.

Early Life

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (FREE-drihkh GAWT-leep KLAWP-shtawk) was the eldest of the seventeen children of Gottlieb Heinrich Klopstock, a lawyer and government official, and his wife, Anna Maria Schmidt. Although his father was always mired in serious financial difficulties, Klopstock was able to receive an excellent education that stressed classical languages and religion at the Prince’s School, Schulpforta, between 1739 and 1745. He proceeded to the University of Jena to study theology but was soon occupied with plans for an epic titled Der Messias (1748-1773; The Messiah, 1776), modeled on John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). He began writing a prose version of the epic’s first three cantos.

The next year, 1746, Klopstock moved to the University of Leipzig. There, he joined a group of young writers who called themselves the Bremer Beiträger (Bremen contributors), after the name of a literary periodical, the Bremer Beitrag. While in Leipzig, Klopstock garnered high praise for the first three cantos of his epic, published anonymously in the Bremer Beitrag. It was in Leipzig as well that he began to turn against the rule-bound classicism of Johann Christoph Gottsched in favor of the freer, subjective, and emotional forms of expression evident in the first of his odes.

Life’s Work

After a year as a private tutor in a noble household in Langensalza, Klopstock traveled to Switzerland. He proposed to complete The Messiah while he was a houseguest of the Swiss poet Jakob Bodmer, who had translated Paradise Lost into German. A quarrel with Bodmer, who found him too worldly, shortened his stay. However, this event coincided with a fortuitous offer from King Frederick V of Denmark that gave Klopstock a refuge and a pension. During a stop in Hamburg on his way to Copenhagen, Klopstock met Margarethe Moller, herself a gifted poet and letter writer, who became first the “Cidli” of his odes and in 1754 his wife. Their happy life together lasted only four years. In 1758, Margarethe Klopstock, together with her infant, died in childbirth. Klopstock tried to console himself by collecting her literary remains, which he published in 1759.

Except for a few trips to Germany, Klopstock remained in Denmark among his devoted Danish and German literary friends for twenty years. He continued work on The Messiah, publishing cantos 1 to 10 in unrhymed hexameter to great acclaim in 1755. His writing also appeared in a literary periodical called Der nördlichen Aufseher (the northern overseer). A biblical drama, Der Tod Adams (pb. 1757; The Death of Adam, 1763), followed. Klopstock did not abandon his favorite subjects, love, nature, friendship, and religion, but during the late 1750’s and 1760’s, influenced by his friend Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg and by James Macpherson’s Ossian poems—Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), collected as The Works of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1765)—he developed an intense interest in early German poetry and in the Germanic past. This patriotic enthusiasm bore fruit in the first of his three bardic dramas, Hermanns Schlacht (pb. 1769; Herman’s battle).

In 1770, when Klopstock’s patron, count von Bernstorff, was dismissed from his post at the Danish court, Klopstock followed him to Hamburg. He remained there for the rest of his life, managing to continue to draw his Danish pension. In Hamburg, too, he was surrounded by friends and admirers. They encouraged him to bring out an authorized edition of his odes in 1771 to replace two unauthorized editions that had been printed a short time before. The next year, Klopstock published another biblical drama, David (pb. 1772).

Klopstock’s Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774; the German literary republic) put forward a plan that had originated in Klopstock’s literary circle in Denmark for a German learned society inspired by the French Academy and the English Royal Society. In this work, Klopstock proposed a utopian community composed of practitioners of the arts and sciences, who would devote themselves to discovering, forming, and giving life to whatever was beautiful and useful. The book received a mixed reception. However, the young adherents of the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe among them, welcomed the work.

Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik also made a great impression on Margrave Karl Friedrich of Baden. Karl Friedrich invited Klopstock to visit and also bestowed on him the title of Hofrat (privy councillor) and a pension, which the poet collected in addition to his Danish pension for the rest of his life. On a side trip from Baden to Frankfurt, Klopstock met Goethe. Their brief friendship lasted until 1776, when Klopstock broke with Goethe because of the latter’s alleged immoral conduct.

Back in Hamburg, Klopstock’s interest in his own and others’ poetry began to wane. However, he cultivated an interest in poetic diction, verse patterns, and language. He published several critical essays on these subjects in 1778 and 1779 and made two more forays into patriotic drama, Hermann und die Fürsten (pb. 1784; Hermann and the princes) and Hermanns Tod (pb. 1787; Hermann’s death).

In 1791, at the age of sixty-seven, Klopstock married for a second time. His bride was Johanna Elisabeth von Winthem, a niece of his first wife. The union seems to have been a happy one. In the last decade of his life, Klopstock’s literary production continued to diminish, both in quantity and in quality. In the early 1790’s, he turned from poetry to philological studies, publishing Grammatische Gespräche (1794; grammatical conversations). However, admirers of his work, especially of his early writings, continued to increase among young German poets and even among literary people from foreign countries.

Klopstock’s enthusiasm for liberty, equality, and fraternity brought him to the attention of the duke de la Rochefoucault, one of the early leaders of the French Revolution. In 1792, the French national assembly named Klopstock an honorary citizen. However, the Reign of Terror, which began the following year, filled him with disappointment and disgust and led him to reject the designation. In 1802, however, he accepted another honor from France, an invitation to be a foreign correspondent to the French National Institute.

Klopstock died in Hamburg on March 14, 1803. He was buried with much pomp and honor next to his first wife in the churchyard in suburban Ottensen.

Significance

Although The Messiah, which occupied Klopstock for more than twenty-eight years, is his best-known work, his odes and other lyric poems written before 1780 are an important part of his place in German literature. In these poems, he turned away from the traditional subject matter, attitude, and form of German neoclassical poetry. Instead, he wrote on love, friendship, nature, and religious feeling. Rather than providing impersonal imitations of the classics, his poems concern the heartfelt experiences of an individual who is obviously often Klopstock himself. Expressing strong natural emotion in simple lively words was something new to German literature in the eighteenth century, as was Klopstock’s insistence that thought, feeling, and language were inseparable. In the interests of authentic expression, Klopstock also experimented with various verse forms, among them free verse; in this, he greatly influenced the practice of German poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Klopstock was indebted to several English poets, among them Milton; Edward Young, whose The Complaint: Or, Night Thoughts (1742-1745) he much admired; and James MacPherson, whose The Works of Ossian was the inspiration for the Hermann trilogy and his bardic poems. Klopstock, in turn, was revered and imitated by young poets and writers of his own time, among them Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Goethe, who praised his intensity, energy, open-endedness, and imagination. His influence is still perceptible in the work of twentieth century poets who wrote in German, such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George.

Bibliography

Hilliard, Kevin. Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts in Klopstock’s Thought. London: Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 1987. Revision of Oxford University doctoral thesis on the influence of culture upon Klopstock. Bibliography.

Hilliard, Kevin, and Katrin Kohl, eds. Klopstock an der Grenze der Epochen. New York: W. de Gruyter, 1995. Essays on various aspects of Klopstock’s work. Includes a bibliography of works written between 1972 and 1992, compiled by Helmut Riege.

Hurlebusch, Klaus. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Foreword by Helmut Schmidt. Hamburg: Ellert & Richter, 2003. Brief biography. Illustrated. Bibliographical references.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Klopstock, Hamann, und Herder als Wegbereiter autorzentrischen Schreibens. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001. Concerned with Klopstock’s contribution to literary modernity and, very briefly, with oral recitation or declamation of his poetry. Includes bibliography.

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Edited by Adolf Beck et al. New York: W. de Gruyter, 1974-   . Multivolume standard edition of Klopstock’s works and letters. Each volume is accompanied by separate volume of commentary.

Kohl, Katrin. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2000. Reviews recent criticism and research. Includes bibliography and index.

Kommerell, Max. Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik. 3d ed. Preface by Eckhard Heftrich. Frankfurt, Germany: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982. First published in Berlin in 1928. Historical and critical treatment of Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, and Hölderlin. Lively and insightful.

Pape, Helmut. Klopstock, Die “Sprache des Herzens” neu entdeckt. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1998. Life-and-works approach. Claims that Klopstock freed the reader from emotional immaturity. Quotes texts to show Klopstock’s influence on the language of his time and on new concepts of the nature of poetry and of poets. Bibliography.