Johann Jakob Bodmer
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Johann Jakob Bodmer (19 July 1698 – 2 January 1783) was a Swiss-German author, academic, critic and poet.
Life
Born at Greifensee, near Zürich, and first studying theology and then trying a commercial career, he finally found his vocation in letters. In 1725 he was appointed professor of Helvetian history in Zürich, a chair which he held for half a century, and in 1735 became a member of the Cantonal Council. He died at Zürich in 1783.
Works
His major writings are the treatises Von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (1740; this and following years link to corresponding "[year] in poetry" articles) and Kritische Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemählde der Dichter (1741), in which he pleaded for the freedom of the imagination from the restriction imposed upon it by French pseudo-classicism. Bodmer's epics Die Sundflutz and Noah (both 1751) are imitations of Klopstock's Messias, and his plays are entirely deficient in dramatic qualities. He also issued editions of the Minnesingers and part of the Nibelungenlied.
He published (1721–1723), in conjunction with Johann Jakob Breitinger and others, Die Discourse der Mahlern, a weekly journal after the model of The Spectator. Through his prose translation of Milton's Paradise Lost (1732), also, he tried to make English literature accessible in Germany. He aroused the hostile criticism of Johann Christoph Gottsched and his school.
References
- T. W. Danzel, Gottsched und seine Zeit (Leipzig, 1848)
- J. Cruger, J. C. Gottsched, Bodmer und Breitinger (Stuttgart, 1884)
- F. Braitmaier, Geschichte der poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Maler bis auf Lessing (Leipzig, 1888)
- Denkschrift zu Bodmers 200. Geburtstag (Zürich, 1900)
