HAGEDORN, FRIEDRICH VON German poet, was born on April 23, 1708, at Hamburg, where his father was Danish minister. He was educated at the gymnasium of Ham burg, and at Jena. Returning to Hamburg in 1729, he became unpaid private secretary to the Danish ambassador in London, where he lived till 1731. 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 died on Oct. 28, 1754. Hagedorn is the first German poet who bears unmis takable testimony to the nation's recovery from the devastation wrought by the Thirty Years' War. His light and graceful love songs and anacreontics, with their undisguised joie de vivre, intro duced 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 philosophy of Horace. He exerted a dominant influence on the German lyric until late in the 18th century.
The best edition of Hagedorn's works is by J. J. Eschenburg (5 vols., Hamburg, 1800) . Selections of his poetry with an excellent introduc tion in F. Muncker, 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 Erzdhlung in Reimversen (1884) .