The nineteenth century virtually ignored Klopstock, and to modern readers his themes seem lofty and distant, his forms empty and esoteric.
Klopstock was a pioneer in preparing the way for German Classicism and subsequent developments. His legacy extends from Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George to contemporary poets such as Paul Celan and Johannes Bobrowski. Language itself constitutes the center of Klopstock's enterprise, and he stands beside Luther and Goethe as a reformer and regenerator of German. He was the first strong poetic personality, and he imbued the position of poet with dignity and divine calling. Finally, and most important, the status he gave to imagination and emotion engendered a new understanding of the nature of poetry.
Klopstock was born on 2 July 1724 in Quedlinburg, Saxony, the first of seventeen children in the prosperous bourgeois family of Gottlob Heinrich Klopstock and Anna Maria Klopstock, née Schmidt. From his father, a government official, he inherited a strong, self-reliant spirit as well as an athletic prowess which he maintained into old age. He was raised in the Protestant religion, which furnished the framework for a large part of his literary work. The family lived from 1732 to 1736 on a country estate, Friedeburg on the Saale River, where Klopstock acquired a reverence for nature.
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