Bodmer, JOHANN JAKOB

Bodmer, JOHANN JAKOB, a Swiss poet and littérateur, was born at Greifensee, near Zurich, in 1698. The study of the Greek and Latin writers, together with the English, French, and Italian masters, having convinced him of the poverty and tastelessness of existing German literature, he resolved to attempt a reformation. Accordingly, in 1721, along with a few other young scholars, he commenced a weekly review, Diskurse der Maler, in which the living poets were sharply handled. After 1740, when Bodmer published a treatise on the Wonderful in Poetry, a famous literary war broke out between him and Gottsched, the pedantic dictator of German literature. Bodmer's followers, the Swiss school, who were nourished on English poetry, maintained the claims of imagination and free poetic impulse against poetry according to hard and fast rules. The controversy partly prepared the way for the Augustan epoch of German literature. Bodmer died at Zurich, where he had held the chair of History for fifty years, 2d January 1783. As an author, he was marked by inexhaustible activity; but his poems, dramas, and translations have no vigour or originality. He did greater service to literature by republishing the old German poets, the Minnesingers, and a part of the Nibelungenlied, as also by his numerous critical writings.