Opitz, MARTIN, German poet, born on 23d December 1597, at Bunzlau on the Bober, in Silesia, who for a century or more after his death was extravagantly praised as the 'Swan of Bober,' the 'Swan of Silesia,' the 'Father and Regenerator of German poetry.' This inflated reputation he had earned by toadying to the princes of Germany, by writing adulatory poems in their honour, by praising third and fourth rate poetasters, who recompensed him in kind. Although himself a Protestant, he worked and wrote for one Count Hannibal von Dohna, a cruel persecutor of the Protestants; but then Count Dohna helped him to get (1628) from the emperor a patent of nobility, and Ferdinand II. had with his imperial hand previously (1625) crowned him with the laurel crown of the poet—recognitions of his talent that Opitz valued above all things. He was summoned (1622) by Bethlen Gabor, Prince of Transylvania, to fill the chair of Philosophy and Polite Literature at Weissenburg; but at the year's end was so homesick, so wearied of the rude, martial people, and so famished through lack of the kind words of his friends, that he returned to Germany. Then he curried favour successively with the Duke of Liegnitz (1624), Count von Dohna (1626), and King Ladislaus IV. of Poland (1634), who made him his secretary and historiographer of Poland. But fate was against him: in 1620 he had fled from Heidelberg to Holland to escape war and the plague; now in Danzig, where he was living, he caught the plague from a beggar, to whom he gave a coin in the street, and died 20th August 1639. The poems Opitz wrote are like his ordering of his life, calculated: they owe their origin to the understanding, have no imagination, and little feeling, and are cold, formal, pedantic. The fact is, Opitz, originally a schoolmaster, schoolmastered poetry into lifeless imitation of pseudo-classic models. Poetry must, he propounded, in his most original work, Buch von der deutschen Poeterei (1624; new ed. 1876), teach and instruct as well as please. Hence his favourite pieces are purely didactic—Trostgedicht in Widerwärtigkeit des Kriegs, Zlatna oder von der Ruhe des Gemüths, Vielgut oder vom wahren Glück, Vesuvius, and others—such as the 'good boy' writes who wishes to please a pedantic master. Yet Opitz is entitled to the credit of having championed the use of his mother-tongue as against Latin, and of having actually used it. He also insisted upon the difference between the ancient prosody of feet and quantity and the modern prosody of accent and rhyme, emphasising the use of the last for German poetry, and recommending the Alexandrine form of verse as that best suited to the genius of his native tongue. His works include translations from classic authors (Sophocles and Seneca, whom he puts on exactly the same rank as dramatists), the Dutchmen Heinsius and Grotius (whom he sets up as models of style), and from the Bible. Through the men who swore by him—the so-called first Silesian school—Opitz reigned for nearly a century as a sort of posthumous literary dictator, a worthy rival of Gottsched.
The best editions of his Gesammelte Schriften are those that appeared in his lifetime (1637, 1641). See Lives by Strehlke (1856), Weinhold (1862), and Palm (1862), and critical works on the Buch der Poeterei by Borinski (1883), Fritsch (1884), and Berghöffer (1888).