KLOPSTOCK, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB. - Poet, Protestant, Pietist, b. at Quedlinburg (Saxony) on 2 July 1724, d. at Hamburg on 14 March 1803. From his earliest years he was nourished by a deep admiration for the beauties of nature. His university studies in theology and his natural inclination toward profound religious and poetic feeling, nourished by his reading of Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, suggested to him the plan of an epic centered on the mystical figure of the Messiah.
This purpose, cherished with youthful enthusiasm, soon led him to draft in prose the framework of the first cantos, which he then published in verse in 1748. The success was immense. For the first time, his contemporaries encountered a poet who, though conceiving a harmonious design for an epic poem—comprehending the entire life of Christ in its most salient and mystically idealized traits, from the decision to redeem humanity to the Ascension into heaven—illuminated it with spontaneous inspiration and a limpid freshness of style. The goal thus seemed within reach, and it appeared to be attained when, in Zurich, he received praise and encouragement from Bodmer, head of that poetic school, who saw in the young poet’s essay an eloquent example to oppose to the artistic criteria of the adversaries of the Leipzig school. *Der Messias* was completed in 1773. Re-reading the poem today, one cannot recapture the enthusiasm it aroused among the poet’s contemporaries. Rarely does poetic feeling expand in the clear vein of harmonious verse; here it breaks off, surges forth in waves, elsewhere it roars violently, and elsewhere it softens into a pathetic tenderness, too manifestly ingenious and vaporous. The principal defect is that K. made his personality too strongly felt in an epic poem. His lyrical sentiment is always present, and the characters are not, therefore, living figures in themselves, but all speak with the single voice of the poet’s heart. Today this poem is the least-read work of K., but his name, besides *Der Messias*, is associated with a series of odes reflecting the loftiest ideals that illuminated his life. And when he does not make poetry the echo of a vaporous ecstasy or of dreamy and elegant aspirations, but allows the string of enthusiasm to vibrate freely and intensely, his accents still touch and move the heart of modern men.
To K. we also owe some dramatic works of biblical subject, but far superior are his prose dramas of a prophetic character (called “barditi,” from the choral verses sung by bards) inspired by his reading of the Ossianic poems.