KLOPSTOCK, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB. — Poet, Protestant, Pietist, born at Quedlinburg (Saxony) on 2 July 1724, died at Hamburg on 14 March 1803. From his earliest years he nourished a deep admiration for the beauties of nature. His university studies in theology and his natural inclination toward a profound religious and poetic sentiment, fostered by reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, suggested to him the design of an epic centered on the mystical figure of the Messiah.
This purpose, cherished with youthful enthusiasm, soon led him to set down in prose the framework of the first cantos, which he later published in verse in 1748. The success was immense. For the first time, his contemporaries encountered a poet who, while conceiving a harmonious design for an epic poem—which encompassed the whole life of Christ in its most salient and mystically idealized features, from the decision to redeem humanity to the ascension into heaven—illuminated it with spontaneous inspiration and limpid freshness of style. The goal was thus marked out, and it seemed to him to have been attained when, in Zurich, he received praise and encouragement from Bodmer, head of that poetic school, who saw in the young poet’s work an eloquent example to set against the artistic principles of the opponents of the Leipzig school. The Messias was completed in 1773. Reading the poem today, it is impossible to share the enthusiasm it aroused among the poet’s contemporaries. Rarely does poetic feeling expand in the limpid vein of harmonious verse; at times, however, it breaks off, elsewhere it overflows in undulating waves, elsewhere it thunders violently, and elsewhere still it softens into a pathetic languor, all too clearly contrived and vaporous. The principal defect is that K. has made his personality felt too strongly in an epic poem. Indeed, the poet’s lyrical sentiment is ever present, and the characters are therefore not figures living in their own right, but all speak with the single voice of the poet’s heart. Today this poem is K.’s least-read work, but his name, in addition to the Messias, is entrusted to a series of odes, in which the highest ideals that illuminated his life are reflected. And when he does not make poetry the echo of a vaporous ecstasy or of dreamy and elegiac aspirations, but allows the chord of enthusiasm to vibrate freely and intensely, his accents still touch the hearts of modern men and move them.
K. also produced several dramatic works on biblical subjects, but much better are his patriotic dramas in prose (called “barditi,” after the verse choruses sung by the bards), which were inspired by his reading of the Ossianic poems.