Ferdinand Freiligrath

FREILIGRATH, FERDINAND German poet, was born at Detmold on June 17, 181o. He was educated for a commercial career. The years from 1831 to 1836 he spent in a bank at Amsterdam, and 1837 to 1839 in a business house at Barmen. In 1838 his Gedichte appeared, and he abandonel commerce. His repudiation of the political poetry of 1841 and it revolutionary ideals induced Frederick William IV., to give hin a pension of 30o thalers a year. He married, and, to be near hi friend Emanuel Geibel, settled at St. Goar. Before long, however Freiligrath was himself carried away by the rising tide of liberal ism. In the poem Ein Glaubensbekenntnis (1844) he avowed hi sympathy with the political movement led by his old adversary Georg Herwegh; the day, he declared, of his own poetic triflini with romantic themes was over; romanticism itself was dead He sacrificed his pension, went to Switzerland, and then of to the publication of his ca ira! (1846), for greater safety, ti London, where he resumed the commercial life he had broker off seven years before. When the revolution of 1848 broke out it seemed to Freiligrath, as to all the liberal thinkers of the time the dawn of an era of political freedom; and in his Politische unt soziale Gedichte (1849-1851), he welcomed it with unboundec enthusiasm. He returned to Germany and settled in Dusseldorf but the publication of his poem, Die Toten an die Lebendei (1848) led to his arrest on a charge of lese-ma jeste. He wa, acquitted, but his association with the democratic movemen rendered him suspect, and in 1851 he returned to London, when he lived for 17 years. In 1868 he returned to Germany, settling first in Stuttgart and in 1875 in the neighbouring town of Cann statt, where he died on March 18, 1876.

Literary Significance.

Freiligrath was the most gifted poet of the German revolutionary group. His own purely lyric poetr) re-echoes for the most part the familiar thoughts and imager) of his romantic predecessors; but at an early age he had beer attracted by the work of French contemporary poets, and he rein vigorated the German lyric by grafting upon it the orientalisrr of Victor Hugo. In this reconciliation of French and Germar romanticism lay Freiligrath's significance for the development of the lyric in Germany. Freiligrath, when he is at his best, displar a vigour and strength, a power of direct and cogent poetic expres. sion, not to be found in any other political singer of the age. He translated many English and Scottish ballads, and much con temporary English verse (Englisc>ze Gedichte aus neuerer Zeit 1846; The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock, 1853, 6th ed. 1887) ; he also translated Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Winter's Tale and Venn! and Adonis, as well as Longfellow's Hiawatha (1857).

Freiligrath's Gedichte have passed through some 5o editions and his Gesammelte Dichtungen, first published in 1870, have reachec a considerable number. Nachgelassenes (including a translation of Byron's Mazeppa) was published in 1883. A selection of Freiligrath': best-known poems in English translation was edited by his daughter, Mrs. Freiligrath-Kroeker, in 5869; also Songs of a Revolutionary Epoch were translated by J. L. Joynes in 1888. Cf. E. Schmidt-Weiss enfels, F. Freiligrath, eine Biographie (1876) ; W. Buchner, F. Freili grath, ern Dichterleben in Brie f en (2 vols., 1881) ; G. Freiligrath, Erinnerungen an F. Freiligrath (1889) ; P. Besson, Freiligrath (Paris, 1899) ; K. Richter, Freiligrath als Ubersetzer (1899) ; E. G. Gudde, Freiligrath Entwicklung als politischer Dichter (Berlin, 1922).