Author: Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb
Biography:
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724-1803: WBIS)
The son of a lawyer, he was born at Quedlinburg in Germany (the eldest of 17 children) and educated at Schulpforta, a famous classical school housed in a monastery near Naumburg. He attended university first at Jena and then at Leipzig; on leaving university he was employed as a tutor to his cousins. While still at school he conceived the ambition of writing a Christian epic on the model of Paradise Lost, an ambition he eventually realized. The first three cantos were not published till 1748 and the poem was not completed in twenty cantos till 1773. Der Messias made such an impressive debut, however, that in 1751 the King of Denmark invited Klopstock to Copenhagen to continue work on it--with a pension that was continued even after he retired to Hamburg in 1770. (Coleridge and Wordsworth visited him there in 1798.) He married Margareta Möller of Hamburg in 1754, but she died in childbirth in 1758; Klopstock brought out a posthumous edition of her writings (1759). An English writer, Elizabeth Smith (q.v.), later presented a translation of their correspondence and other documents as Memoirs of Friedrich and Margarita Klopstock (1808, posthumously). In 1791 Klopstock made a second marriage to Johanna Elisabeth von Winthem, the widowed niece of his first wife. Besides his great work, he established a reputation as a gifted lyric poet; he also wrote several plays on religious or historical themes. Despite his fame in Germany and some tentative attempts at translation of his works into English in the 1760s when The Messiah was still incomplete, it was not until after his death that Klopstock's name became well known through translation to English readers. (Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie [2006] 5:718-19; Henry and Mary Garland, Oxford Companion to German Literature [1976])
Other Names:
- Frederick Klopstock
- Klopstock