67 articles
Adelbert von Chamisso
Adelbert von Chamisso, born Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot de Boncourt, was a French-born German-language poet and naturalist who wrote Peter Schlemihl and discovered alternation of generations in salps.
Agnes Miegel
Agnes Miegel (1879–1964) was a German poet and ballad writer celebrated for writing about East Prussia, known as the Mother of East Prussia, who supported the Nazi regime.
Alfred Lichtenstein
Alfred Lichtenstein (1889 to 1914) was a German expressionist poet and narrator whose poem Die Dämmerung (1911) made his name; he fell in World War I in 1914.
Andreas Gryphius
Andreas Gryphius, born Andreas Greif, was a German Baroque lyric poet and dramatist from Glogau in Silesia, famous for his sonnets and regarded as the founder of German art drama.
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) was a German poet, prose writer, and composer from Westphalia, best known for the novella Die Judenbuche (1842) and her landscape lyric.
Arno Holz
Arno Holz (1863–1929) was a German lyric poet and dramatist, the leading theorist of literary Naturalism, known for the formula "Kunst = Natur − x" and the rhymeless Phantasus.
August Stramm
August Stramm (1874–1915) was a German Expressionist poet and playwright, the leading contributor of Wortkunst to the journal Der Sturm, killed in action in World War I.
Carl Spitteler
Carl Spitteler (1845–1924) was a Swiss poet who won the 1919 Nobel Prize in Literature for his epic Olympischer Frühling, and whose 1914 speech defending Swiss neutrality became a founding text of Swiss self-understanding.
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–1769) was a German poet and Leipzig professor whose fables and sacred songs made him one of the most-read authors of his century.
Christian Morgenstern
Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) was a German poet, translator, and journalist, born in Munich, whose comic verse collection Galgenlieder (1905) made him a pioneer of German nonsense poetry.
Christoph Martin Wieland
Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) was a German Enlightenment poet and novelist, for a time the most widely read German author and a forerunner of Weimar Classicism.
Clemens Brentano
Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) was a German poet and writer, a leading figure of the Heidelberg Romantics best known for co-editing the folk-song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn with Achim von Arnim.
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898) was a Swiss writer who composed in German, known for historical novellas like Das Amulett and Jürg Jenatsch and for formally exact lyric poetry.
Detlev von Liliencron
Detlev von Liliencron, born Friedrich Freiherr von Liliencron, was a German lyric poet whose impressionist verse made him one of Germany's most celebrated voices in the 1890s.
Durs Grünbein
Durs Grünbein, born 1962 in Dresden, is a German poet, essayist, and translator who debuted with Grauzone morgens in 1988 and won the Georg Büchner Prize in 1995.
Eduard Mörike
Eduard Mörike (1804–1875) was a German lyric poet and Lutheran pastor, born in Ludwigsburg, best known for his 1838 Gedichte and the novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag.
Elke Erb
Elke Erb (1938–2024) was a German poet, editor, and translator, a central figure of East German experimental poetry who received the Georg Büchner Prize in 2020.
Else Lasker-Schüler
Else Lasker-Schüler, born Elisabeth Schüler, was a German Jewish poet and playwright, a leading voice of German Expressionism, who won the 1932 Kleist Prize and died in exile in Jerusalem in 1945.
Ernst Jandl
Ernst Jandl (1925–2000) was an Austrian poet and a central figure of German-language experimental poetry, best known for the sound poem "schtzngrmm" and the comic "ottos mops".
Ernst Moritz Arndt
Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) was a German nationalist historian, writer, and poet born on Rügen whose patriotic songs and pamphlets made him a leading voice against Napoleonic rule.
Ernst Stadler
Ernst Stadler (1883–1914) was a German expressionist poet best known for the collection Der Aufbruch and its signature long verse lines; he died in the First World War.
Ferdinand Avenarius
Ferdinand Avenarius (1856–1923) was a German poet and editor who founded and edited the journal Der Kunstwart from 1887 and co-founded the Dürerbund in 1902.
Ferdinand Freiligrath
Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876) was a German poet and translator who rose to fame with exotic verse, became the leading political poet of the 1848 revolution, and introduced Walt Whitman to German readers.
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) was a German religious poet from Quedlinburg whose epic Der Messias, published from 1748 to 1773, transformed German verse by abandoning rhyme for classical hexameter.
Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) was a German lyric poet, novelist, and translator, author of Hyperion and the great hymns Der Rhein, Brot und Wein, and Patmos.
Friedrich Leopold, Count Stolberg
Friedrich Leopold, Count Stolberg (Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg, 1750–1819) was a German lyric poet and travel writer who traveled with Goethe and converted to Catholicism in 1800.
Friedrich Rückert
Friedrich Rückert, pseudonym Freimund Reinmar, was a German poet and professor of Oriental languages whose verse translations of the Quran and Persian poets founded German Oriental studies.
Georg Herwegh
Georg Herwegh (1817–1875) was a German poet and revolutionary whose 1841 collection Gedichte eines Lebendigen made him famous; in 1848 he led German exiles into the Baden revolution.
Georg Heym
Georg Heym (1887–1912) was a German poet, playwright, and writer of short fiction, a central figure of early Expressionism best known for his apocalyptic big-city poems.
Georg Trakl
Georg Trakl (1887–1914) was an Austrian lyric poet and principal figure of early German-language Expressionism whose dark, imagistic verse appears in Gedichte (1913) and Sebastian im Traum (1914).