Poetry in Germany, 1450–1700

Summary

Two Distinct Literary Traditions Representing two strands of cultural advancement marked the development of early modern German poetry: a vernacular, or “popular,” culture transmitted in pragmatic secular and religious forms and inspired by the Reformation; and an international humanist culture rooted in classical traditions, communicated mainly in Latin but eventually developing a vernacular learned culture as well. In Germany, many learned poets wrote both in Latin and German, Latin being dominant up to the late sixteenth century and German in the seventeenth. It is impossible to establish absolute temporal boundaries for early modern German poetry: the late medieval song tradition remained vital well into the sixteenth century, while the gallant and political poetry of the eighteenth century had distinct beginnings before 1700.

The development of poetry in early modern Germany was affected by profound changes in politics, society, economy, religion, and science; the renewed interest in classical antiquity and the rise of humanism; the cataclysm of the Protestant Reformation and subsequent confessional strife; the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War; and the rise of the absolutist territorial state. One of the most significant extrinsic factors was the invention of movable type, with the ensuing proliferation of printed books. In the subsequent shift from an oral to a written culture, new patterns of distribution and dissemination as well as new poetic forms arose. While the late medieval song tradition declined in the sixteenth century, the evolving print culture supported media such as the broadsheet and poetry collections as well as new genres such as the emblem, the sonnet, and the pattern poem.

Poetry as a generic term had a different meaning to the early modern poet and reader. Hybrid and mixed forms were common. The modern triad of poetic, epic, and dramatic literature originated in Italian Renaissance poetics (Giovanni Giorgio Trissino, Poetica, 1529) and was not yet definitively established in German poetics until the eighteenth century.