Schubart, CHRISTIAN DANIEL, poet, was born 13th April 1739 at Sontheim in Swabia, and studied theology, afterwards becoming school-master and organist, first at Geisslingen and then at Ludwigsburg. But he wrote satirical poems and spoke unadvisedly, lost his post, and then led a wandering life in various cities and countries, giving poetical readings and piano performances. He got into difficulty in Austrian territory at Ulm, was enticed back to Württemberg by the prince, whom he had greatly irritated by a stinging epigram, was carried to the fortress-prison of Hohen-Asperg (1777), and there pined for ten years. Then he was set free by intervention of the Prussian court, and straightway appointed court musician and theatre-director at Stuttgart to the same prince who had kept him all these years in prison. But he was utterly broken in health, and died 10th October 1791. His poetry is very unequal in value; he was an effective satirist of abuses in church and state, and some of his patriotic pieces, odes and hymns, have real poetic worth; but he is chiefly remembered for his tragic fate, and for the influence his work exercised on Schiller. His Gesammelte Schriften (including essays and newspaper articles) fill 8 volumes.
See the autobiographical Schubarts Leben (1793), and monographs on the man by D. F. Strauss (1849), Hauff (1885), and Nägele (1888).