KLOPSTOCK, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB (1724–1803)

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.

See also Drama: German ; German Literature and Language ; Germany, Idea of ; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von ; Herder, Johann Gottfried ; Pietism.

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