WIELAND, CHRISTOPH MARTIN. - German poet, b. at Oberholzheim (Swabia) on 5 Sept. 1733, d. at Weimar on 20 Jan. 1813.
He received a pietistic education and studied law at Tübingen. At Zurich he was a guest of Bodmer, who admired his hexameter fragment *Hermann* (1751); but he later fell out with Bodmer over his rejection of the “seraphic” mentality. From 1760 he served as secretary to the municipal chancellery at Biberach (Swabia), and from 1769 as professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt. He moved in French social circles without conflict. His political utopia in novel form, *Der goldene Spiegel* (1772), won him the post of tutor to the hereditary prince Karl August of Saxe-Weimar. A friend of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Kleist, he opposed the disciples of Klopstock, the *Stürmer und Dränger*, and the Romantics.
A leading exponent of German literary rococo, one of the most skilled translators and the first major German publicist open to all modern spiritual currents. Wieland achieved poetic mastery only after freeing himself from the literary models of Bodmer and Klopstock and from the chorus of puritanical fanaticism that culminated in the preface to his prose hymns *Empfindungen eines Christen* (1757). His translations—mostly in prose—of Shakespeare’s 22 *Theatralische Werke* (1762–66) decisively influenced the contemporary Shakespeare cult; and in English metres he composed the first German tragedy in iambic pentameter (*Lady Johanna Gray*, 1756–58), a metre later adopted for classical drama in Germany. Drawing on the worldly wisdom and irony of Aristophanes, Lucian, Horace, Cicero (whom he translated extensively), Ariosto, Cervantes, Erasmus, Voltaire, Shaftesbury, and Sterne, he produced seven major novels—mostly set in Greece or the Orient—six verse tales (some in ottava rima) and several operas: masterpieces of imagination and style whose linguistic suppleness had hitherto been unattained, and some of capital importance for the further development of German and European literatures. His autobiographical *Bildungsroman*, *Geschichte des Agathon* (1766–94)—one of the models for Goethe’s *Wilhelm Meister*—traces the transformation of a young enthusiast into a balanced man, while the satire *Die Abderiten* (1774–81) evokes the narrow, servile outlook of the philistine. His romantic epic *Oberon* (1780), which Weber later set to music, is hailed by Goethe as Wieland’s masterpiece, weaving Chaucerian, Shakespearean, and chivalric motifs into a moving tale of adventure and steadfast love between two couples. The journals that Wieland founded and long edited, *Der teutsche Merkur* (1773–1810) and *Attisches Museum* (1796–1803, 1805–1809), ranked among the most important of their day, especially through the collaboration of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder.