OPITZ VON BOBERFELD, MARTIN German poet, was born at Bunzlau, Silesia, on Dec. 23, 1597, and studied at Frankfurt-on-Oder, Iieidelberg and Leyden. He led a wandering life in the service of various territorial nobles. In 1624 he was appointed councillor to duke George Rudolf of Liegnitz and Brieg in Silesia, and in 1625, as reward for a requiem poem composed on the death of archduke Charles of Austria, was crowned laureate by the emperor Ferdinand II. who a few years later ennobled him under the title "von Boberfeld." He was elected a member of the Fruchtbringende Gessellschaft in 1629, and in 163o went to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Hugo Grotius. He settled in 1635 at Danzig, where Ladislaus IV. of Poland made him his historiographer and secretary. Here he died of the plague on Aug. 20, 1639.
Opitz was the head of the so-called First Silesian School of poets. His Bach von der deutschen Poeterey (1624) put an end to the hybridism that had until then prevailed, and established rules for the "purity" of language, style, verse and rhyme. Opitz's
own poems are mostly a formal and sober elaboration of care fully considered themes, and contain little beauty and less feel ing. To this didactic and descriptive category belong his best poems.
Collected editions of Opitz's works appeared in 1625, 1629, 1637, 1641, 1690 and 1746. His Ausgewahlte Dichtungen have been edited by J. Tittmann (1869) and by H. Oesterley (Kiirschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur, vol. xxvii. 1889). There are modern reprints of the Bach von der deutschen Poeterey by W. Braune (2nd ed., 1832), and, together with Aristarchus, by G. Witkowski (1888), and also of the Teutsche Poemata, of 1624, by G. Witkowski (1902). See H. Palm, Beitrdge zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur des thten and z7ten Jahrhunderts (1877) ; K. Borinski, Die Poetik der Renaissance (1886) ; R. Beckherrn, Opitz, Ronsard and Heinsius (1888). Bibliography by H. Oesterley in the Zentralblatt fiir Bibliothekswesen for 1885.