(1724-1803) poet, essayist, playwright
Friedrich Klopstock was born in the city of Quedlin-burg to the lawyer and government adviser Gottlieb Klopstock and his wife, Anna Maria. He attended high school in his hometown before going on to study theology at the universities of Jena and Leipzig.
In Leipzig, Klopstock published the first three cantos from his Messiah, a work that engaged him for the next 50 years and established his reputation as a poet of extraordinary talent. After stays in Switzerland and Denmark, Klopstock settled in Hamburg, where he produced the bulk of his literary work and spent the rest of his life.
A mild-mannered, religious man, Klopstock reveals his personality and disposition in many ways in his writing. Messiah is his best and most representative work, which he himself referred to as his “primary life’s purpose.” This long poem recounts the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus and his redemption of humankind. Written in hexameters, an unfamiliar verse form for German poetry at the time, the work stands out not only for the density and beauty of the language but also for its unique representation of Christ.
Enlightenment thinkers portrayed Jesus as a kind of exemplary moralist, but Klopstock depicts him as an intermediary between God and man, a medium of God’s eternal nature. Klopstock’s intentions in writing the work were not only literary but also spiritual, as he sought to set down Christian revelatory experience in an enduring form that would speak to all human beings.
Though Klopstock also wrote literary essays and biblical dramas, it is chiefly for Messiah, as well as his lyric poetry, that he is now remembered. goethe, schiller, Holderlin, and the great German Romantic writers were among the admirers of Klopstock’s work. His influence on German poetry has been and continues to be fundamental.
An English Version of Works by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
Kohl, Karin M. Rhetoric, the Bible, and the Origins of Free Verse: The Early Hymns of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. New York: W. de Gruyter, 1990.
Works about Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
Hilliard, Kevin. Philosophy, Letters, and the Fine Arts in Klopstock’s Thought. London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1987.
Lee, Meredith. Displacing Authority: Goethe’s Poetic Reception of Klopstock. Heidelberg: Univer-sitatsverlag C. Winter, 1999.
