Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb

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 nourished a long-standing admiration for the beauties of nature. His university studies in theology and his natural inclination toward a deep religious and poetic sentiment, fed by the reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, suggested to him the design of an epic whose center would be the mystical figure of the Messiah.

This purpose, cherished with youthful enthusiasm, soon led him to draft in prose the fabric of the first cantos, which he then published, versified, in 1748. The success was immense. For the first time his contemporaries encountered a poet who, though he had conceived a harmonious design of an epic poem - it encompassed the whole life of Christ in its most salient and mystically idealized traits: from the resolve to redeem humanity to the ascension into heaven - illuminated it with spontaneous inspiration and limpid freshness of style. The goal was therefore marked out and seemed to him attained when, at Zurich, he received praise and encouragement from Bodmer, head of that poetic school, who saw in the young poet's essay the eloquent example to set against the artistic criteria of the opponents of the Leipzig school. The Messiah was completed in 1773. Reading the poem again today, it is impossible to be seized by the enthusiasm that it aroused among the poet's contemporaries. Rarely does the poetic sentiment expand in the limpid vein of harmonious verse, but here it breaks off, there it overflows in waves, elsewhere it clamors violently, elsewhere it softens into a pathetic mellowness, too plainly ingenious and vaporous. The principal defect is that K. made his personality too strongly felt in an epic poem. Indeed, the poet's lyrical sentiment is always present, and the characters are therefore not figures living for themselves, but all speak with the single voice of the poet's heart. Today this poem is K.'s least-read work, but his name, besides the Messiah, is entrusted to a series of odes, in which are reflected the highest ideals that illuminated his life. And when he does not make poetry the echo of a vaporous ecstasy or of dreamy and elegiac aspirations, but lets the chord of enthusiasm vibrate freely and intensely, his accents still touch our hearts as modern men and move them.

To K. are also owed certain dramatic works on biblical subjects, but much better are his patriotic dramas in prose (called "barditi", from the choruses in verse sung by the bards) that were inspired in him by the reading of the Ossianic poems.

Rodolfo Bottacchiari