WIELAND, CHRISTOPH MARTIN. — German poet, born at Oberholzheim (Swabia) on 5 September 1733, died at Weimar on 20 January 1813.
He received a Pietist education and studied law at Tübingen. In Zurich he was Bodmer’s guest, an admirer of his fragment in hexameters Hermann (1751); but he came into conflict with him after distancing himself from the “seraphic” mentality. From 1760 he was secretary of the Municipal Chancellery of Biberach (Swabia), and from 1769 professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt. He frequented Frenchified social circles. His political utopia in the form of a novel, Der goldene Spiegel (1772), earned him the position of tutor to the crown prince Karl August of Sachsen-Weimar. A friend of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Kleist, he was opposed by Klopstock’s disciples, the Stürmer, and the Romantics.
The supreme representative of German literary Rococo, one of the most skilful translators and the first great German publicist, open to all modern spiritual currents, W. achieved poetic mastery after breaking away from the Bodmerian and Klopstockian literary models and from an insincere Puritan fanaticism culminating in the preface to the prose hymns Empfindungen eines Christen (1757). He translated, mostly into prose, Shakespeare’s 22 Theatralische Werke (1762–66), with a decisive influence on the period’s Shakespeare cult, and wrote, following English metre, the first German tragedy in iambs and five stresses (Lady Johanna Gray, 1756–58), a metre subsequently adopted by classical drama in Germany. Making his own the wisdom of life and irony as they appear in the works of Aristophanes, Lucian, Horace, Cicero (authors whose works W. translated extensively), Ariosto, Cervantes, Erasmus, Voltaire, Shaftesbury, and Sterne, he composed seven major novels, mostly set in Greece or the Orient, six stories in verse, some in ottava rima, and several melodramas: masterpieces of imagination and style, displaying a linguistic flexibility until then never attained, and some of capital importance for the subsequent development of German and European literatures. The formative novel with a strongly autobiographical basis, Geschichte des Agathon (1766–94), one of the models for Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, represents the transformation of a young Schwürmer into a well-balanced man, while the satire Die Abderiten (1774–81) mocks the narrow and servile mentality of the philistines. The Romantic epic Oberon (1780), the basis of Weber’s opera and praised by Goethe as a masterpiece by W., interweaves Chaucerian, Shakespearean, and chivalric motifs in a moving tale of adventures and the faithful love of two couples. The journals founded and directed by W. for many years, Der teutsche Merkur (1773–1810) and Attisches Museum (1796–1803, 1805–1809), rank among the most important of the period, especially on account of the contributions of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder.