Novalis (born Might 2, 1772, Oberwiederstedt, Prussian Saxony [Germany]—died March 25, 1801, Weissenfels, Saxony [Germany]) was an early German Romantic poet and theorist who vastly influenced later Romantic thought.
Novalis was born right into a household of Protestant Decrease Saxon the Aristocracy and took his pseudonym from “de Novali,” a reputation his household had previously used. He studied legislation on the College of Jena (1790), the place he grew to become acquainted with Friedrich von Schiller, after which at Leipzig, the place he shaped a friendship with Friedrich von Schlegel and was launched to the philosophical concepts of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He accomplished his research at Wittenberg in 1793, and in 1796 he was appointed auditor to the Saxon authorities saltworks at Weissenfels.
In 1794 Novalis met and fell in love with 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. They had been engaged in 1795, however she died of tuberculosis two years later. Novalis expressed his grief in Hymnen an die Nacht (1800; Hymns to the Evening), six prose poems interspersed with verse. On this work Novalis celebrates evening, or dying, as an entry into a better life within the presence of God and anticipates a mystical and loving union with Sophie and with the universe as a complete after his personal dying. In 1797 he went to the Academy of Freiberg to check mining. Novalis grew to become engaged (to Julie von Charpentier) in 1798, and a 12 months later he grew to become a mine inspector on the saltworks at Weissenfels. He died of tuberculosis in 1801.
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Poetry: First Lines
Novalis’s final years had been astonishingly inventive, stuffed with encyclopaedic research, the draft of a philosophical system based mostly on idealism, and poetic work. Two collections of fragments that appeared throughout his lifetime, Blütenstaub (1798; “Pollen”) and Glauben und Liebe (1798; “Religion and Love”), point out his try to unite poetry, philosophy, and science in an allegorical interpretation of the world. His legendary romance Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), set in an idealized imaginative and prescient of the European Center Ages, describes the magical and romantic searchings of a younger poet. The central picture of his visions, a blue flower, grew to become a widely known image of Romantic longing amongst Novalis’s fellow Romantics. Within the essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799; “Christendom or Europe”), Novalis requires a common Christian church to revive, in a brand new age, a Europe whose medieval cultural, social, and intellectual unity had been destroyed by the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
