The Life and Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Vol. 1: From the German (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

Excerpt from The Life and Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Vol. 1: From the German

To the cultivators of German literature Lessing needs no introduction, so entirely is he identified with its res toration and growth in what may be called its second classical period. His career begins precisely in the middle of the last century, and extends over thirty years of incessant activity and warfare against the meanness and barbarism into which German letters were then sunk. Indeed, at that time Germany had no national literature. The heroic songs of the Nibelungen and the sentimental lays of the Minnesingers were forgotten, or known only to be despised. From the era of the Reformation, poetry ceased to be national, and became servilely and drearily imitative. Even Opitz, in his famous Baa/z van der teatsclzen Poeterey presented to his countrymen little more than a compilation of maxims drawn from foreign models, which he declared it impossible to sur pass. Critics like Bodmer and Breitinger, and poets like Von Haller and Gellert, had made honest and patri otic efforts to resist the prevalent Gallomania; but their opposition was radically feeble, and also too remote to effect much against the powerful influence of Gottsched.

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