MARTIN OPITZ VON BOBERFELD (1597-1639)  , German poet, was born at Bunzla.0 in Silesia on the 23rd of December 1597, the son of a prosperous citizen . He received his early education at the Gymnasium of his native town, of which his uncle was rector, and in 1617 attended the high school—" Schonaichianum "—at Beuthen, where he made a special study of French, Dutch and Italian poetry . In 1618 he entered the university of Frankfort-on-Oder as a student of literae humaniores, and in the same year published his first essay, Aristarchus, sive De contemptu linguae Teutonicae, a plea for the purification of the German language from foreign adulteration . In 1619 he went to Heidelberg, where he became the leader of the school of young poets which at that time made that university town remarkable . Visiting Leiden in the following year he sat at the feet of the famous Dutch lyric poet Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655), whose Lobgesang Jesu Christi and Lobgesang Bacchi he had already translated into alexandrines . After being for a short year (1622) professor of philosophy at the Gymnasium of Weissenburg (now Karlsburg) in Transylvania; he led a wandering life in the service of various territorial nobles . In 1624 he was appointed councillor to Duke George Rudolf of Liegnitz and Brieg in Silesia, and in 1625, as reward for a requiem poem composed on the death of Archduke Charles of Austria, was crowned laureate by the emperor Ferdinand II. who a few years later ennobled him under the title " von Boberfeld." He was elected a member of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft in 1629, and in 1630 went to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Hugo Grotius . He settled in 1635 at Danzig, where Ladislaus IV. of Poland made him his historiographer and secretary . Here he died of the plague on the loth of August 1639 . Opitz was the head of the so-called First Silesian School of poets(see GERMANY :Literature), and was during his life regarded as the greatest German poet . Although he would not to-day be considered a poetical genius, he may justly claim to have been the " father of German poetry " in respect at least of its form; his Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624) put an end to the hybridism that had until then prevailed, and established rules for the " purity " of language, style, verse and rhyme . Opitz's own poems are in accordance with the rigorous rules which he laid down .

They are mostly a formal and sober elaboration of carefully considered themes, and contain little beauty and less feeling . To this didactic and descriptive

category belong his best poems, Trost-Gedichte in Widerwartigkeit des Krieges (written 1621, but not published till 1633); Zlatna, oder von Rieke des Gemuts (1622); Lob des Feldlebens (1623); Vielgut, oder vom wahren Glitch (1629), and Vesuvius (1633) . These contain some vivid poetical descriptions, but are in the main treatises in poetical form . In 1624 Opitz published a collected edition of his poetry under the title Acht Bucher deutscher Poematum (though, owing to a mistake on the part of the printer, there are only five books); his Dafne (1627), to which Heinrich Schutz composed the music, is the earliest German opera . Besides numerous translations, Opitz edited (1639) Das Annolied, a Middle High German poem of the end of the 11th century, and thus preserved it from oblivion . Collected editions of Opitz's works appeared in 1625, 1629, 1637, 1641, 1690 and 1746 . His Ausgewahlte Dichtungen have been edited by J . Tittmann (1869) and by H . Oesterley (Kiirschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur, vol. xxvii . 1889) . There are modern reprints of the Buch von der deutschen Poeterey by W . Braune (2nd ed., 1882), and, together with Aristarchus, by G .

Witkowski (1888), and also of the Teutsche Poemata, of 1624, by G . Witkowski (1902) . See H .

Palm, Beitrage zurGeschichte der deutschen Literatur des 16ten and.7ten Jahrhunderts (1877); K . Borinski, Die Poetik der Renaissance (1886); R . Beckherrn, Opitz, Ronsard and Heinsius (1888) . Bibliography by H . Oesterley in the Zentralblatt fur Bibliothekswesen for 1885 .