Poetry
Kleist's chief work is a poem in hexameters, Der Frühling (1749), for which Thomson's Seasons largely supplied ideas. It earned him the nickname "the Poet of the Spring." In his description of the beauties of nature Kleist shows real poetical genius, an almost modern sentiment and fine taste. He also wrote some charming odes, idylls and elegies, and a small epic poem Cissides und Paches (1759), the subject being two Thessalian friends who die an heroic death for their country in a battle against the Athenians. Likewise he composed epitaphs for his many friends who were killed in battle, such as Major Heinrich von Blumenthal:
Witz, Einsicht, Wissenschaft, Geschmack, Bescheidenheit,
und Menschenlieb und Tapferkeit,
und alle Tugenden vereint mit allen Gaben besass der, den man hier begraben.
Er starb für's Vaterland
er starb mit Heldenmuth.
Ihr Winde wehet sanft,
die heilige Asche ruht.
(Wit, perception, learning, taste, modesty, and kindliness and courage, and all virtues united with all gifts, had he who lies here buried. He died for the Fatherland, he died with heroic courage. Ye winds sough softly, the holy ashes are at rest.)
Kleist published in 1756 the first collection of his Gedichte, which was followed by a second in 1758. After his death his friend Karl Wilhelm Ramler published an edition of Kleist's Sämtliche Werke in 2 vols (1760). A critical edition was published by August Sauer, in 3 vols (1880–1882). See also Arthur Chuquet, De Ewaldi Kleistii vita et scriptis (Paris, 1887), and Heinrich Pröhle, Friedrich der Grosse und die deutsche Literatur (1872).
Read more about this topic: Ewald Christian Von Kleist
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Firm in our beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It is at the same time by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendors found behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to one’s eyes, these tears are not the sign of excessive pleasure, they are rather witness to an irritated melancholy, to a condition of nerves, to a nature exiled to imperfection and which would like to seize immediately, on this very earth, a revealed paradise.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)