BODMER, JOHANN JAKOB (1698-1783), Swiss-Ger man author, was born at Greifensee, near Zurich, on July 19 1698. In 1725 he was appointed professor of Helvetian history in Zurich, a chair which he held for half a century, and in became a member of the "Grosser Rat." He published (1721– 23), in conjunction with J. J. Breitinger (170I-74) and several others, Die Diskurse der Mahlern, a weekly journal after the model of the Spectator. Through his prose translation of Milton's Paradise Lost (173 2) and his successful endeavours to make a knowledge of English literature accessible to Germany, he aroused the hostile criticism of Gottsched (q.v.) and his school, a struggle which ended in the complete discomfiture of the latter. His most important writings are the treatises Von dem Einfluss and Gebrauche der Einbildungskra f t (1727); Von dem IVunderbaren in der Poesie (1740) ; and Kritische Be trachtungen fiber die poetischen Gemdlde der Dickler (1741), in which he pleaded for the freedom of the imagination from the restriction imposed upon it by French pseudo-classicism and for descriptive poetry in general. Bodmer's epics Die Sundfluth (175 1) and Noah (17 51) are weak imitations of Klopstock's and his plays are entirely deficient in dramatic qualities. He did inestimable service to German literature by opening up the field of early German poetry by his editions of the Minne singers and part of the Nibelungenlied. He died on his farm near Zurich on Jan. 2 1783.