BROCKES, BARTHOLD HEINRICH Ger man poet, was born at Hamburg on Sept. 22, 1680. He studied jurisprudence at Halle, and after extensive travels in Italy, France and Holland, settled in his native town in 1704. In 1720 he was appointed a member of the Hamburg senate, and entrusted with several important offices. Six years (from 1735 to 1741) he spent as Amtrnann (magistrate) at Ritzebiittel. He died in Hamburg Jan. 16, 1747. Brocke's poetic works were published in a series of nine volumes under the fantastic title Irdisches V ergniigen in Gott (1721-48) ; he also translated Marini's La Strage degli innocenti (1 715), Pope's Essay on Man (1740), and Thomson's Seasons (1745). He was one of the first German poets to sub stitute for the bombastic imitations of Marini, to which he him self had begun by contributing, a clear and simple diction. His verses, artificial and crude as they often are, express a reverential attitude towards nature and a religious interpretation of natural phenomena which was new to German poetry.
Brockes' autobiography was published by J. M. Lappenberg in the Zeit schri f t des Vereins f air Hamburger Geschichte, ii. (1847) . See also A. Brandl, B. H. Brockes (1878), and D. F. Strauss, Brockes and H. S. Reimarus (Gesammelte Schri f ten, ii.) .