FRIEDRICH VON

See also:

• FRIEDRICH VON HAGEDORN (1708-1754)

HAGEDORN (1708-1754)  , German poet, was born on the 23rd of April 1708 at Hamburg, where his father, a man of scientific and literary taste, was Danish minister . He was educated at the gymnasium of Hamburg, and later (1726) became a student of law at Jena . Returning to Hamburg in 1729, he obtained the appointment of unpaid private secretary to the Danish ambassador in London, where he lived till 1731 . Hagedorn's return to Hamburg was followed by a period of great poverty and hardship, but in 1733 he was appointed secretary to the so-called " English Court " (Englischer Hof) in Hamburg, a trading company founded in the 13th century . He shortly afterwards married, and from this time had sufficient leisure to pursue his literary occupations till his death on the 28th of October 1754 . Hagedorn is the first German poet who bears unmistakable testimony to the nation's recovery from the devastation wrought by the Thirty Years' War . He is eminently a social poet . His light and graceful love-songs and anacreontics, with their undisguised joie de vivre, introduced a new note into the German lyric; his fables and tales in verse are hardly inferior in form and in delicate persiflage to those of his master La Fontaine, and his moralizing poetry re-echoes the philosophyof Horace . He exerted a dominant influence on the German lyric until late in the 18th century . The first collection of Hagedorn's poems was published at Ham-burg shortly after his return from Jena in 1729, under the title Versuch einiger Gedichte (reprinted by A . Sauer, Heilbronn, 1883) . In 1738 appeared Versuch in poetischen Fabeln and Erzahlungen; in 1742 a collection of his lyric poems, under the title Sammlung neuer Oden and Lieder; and his Moralische Gedichte in 175o .

A collection of his entire

works was published at Hamburg after his death in 1757 . The best is J . J . Eschenburg's edition (5 vols., Hamburg, 1800) . Selections of his poetry with an excellent introduction in F . Muncker's Anakreontiker and preussisch-patriotische Lyriker (Stuttgart, 1894) . See also H . Schuster, F. von Hagedorn and seine Bedeutung fur die deutsche Literatur (Leipzig, 1882); W . Eigenbrodt, Hagedorn and die Erzahlung in Reimversen (Berlin, 1884) .