BALDE, JAKOB. - Jesuit and poet, called the Horace of Germany, born in Alsace at Ensisheim (he is known to have been baptized on 4 Jan. 1604), died at Neuburg on 9 Aug. 1668. Having entered the Society of Jesus (1624), he spent his entire life teaching humanities and rhetoric at Innsbruck and Munich, apart from two brief intervals: as court preacher in Munich (1638–40); and as official historiographer of Bavaria (1640–48); he had to be relieved of this office because it was too uncongenial to his character.
An exquisite and imaginative poet, responsive to the two great loves of religion and country, he exercised his talent in every genre of poetry—dramatic, epic, satirical, didactic—with a predominance of lyric poetry, in which he comes closest to Horace. His masterpiece is Lyricorum libri IV et Epodon liber
unus (Munich 1643); other works include: Silvae lyricæ (ibid. 1643 and 46); Paraphrasis lyricæ in Philomelam Divi Bonaventuræ (ibid. 1645); De laudibus B. M. V., seu odæ partheniae (ibid. 1649); Urania victrix sive animae christianae certamina (ibid. 1663). His German poems, fewer in number, are also inferior in literary value, except for his Ehrenpreis, der allerheiligsten Jungfrauen und Mutter Gottes Maria (ibid. 1639).
Public favor, which led to repeated editions of his works, declined during the eighteenth century, but revived at the beginning of the nineteenth, when editions and translations were again produced. The bust of B. was placed in the Bavarian Pantheon at Ratisbon; in 1868 a «Baldverein» was founded in Munich; and in Kaulbach’s painting The Century of the Reformation, in the Berlin museum, he appears as a representative of poetry, alongside Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Hans Sachs.