Martin Opitz
in full Martin Opitz von Boberfeld
born Dec. 23, 1597, Bunzlau, Silesia
[now Bolesławiec, Pol.]
died Aug. 20, 1639, Danzig [now Gdańsk,
Pol.]
German poet and literary theorist who
introduced foreign literary models into
German poetry and who was a pioneer in
establishing a national German
literature.
Opitz studied at universities in
Frankfurt an der Oder, Heidelberg, and
Leiden, where he met the Dutch poet
Daniël Heinsius. He led a wandering life
in the service of various territorial
nobles. In 1625, as a reward for a
requiem poem on the death of Charles
Joseph of Austria, he was crowned
laureate by the Holy Roman emperor
Ferdinand II, who later ennobled him. In
1629 he was elected to the
Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the most
important of the literary societies that
aimed to reform the German language. He
went to Paris in 1630, where he made the
acquaintance of the Dutch jurist Hugo
Grotius. He lived from 1635 until his
death at Danzig (Gdańsk), where
Władysław IV of Poland made him his
historiographer and secretary.
Opitz was the head of the so-called
First Silesian school of poets and
during his life was regarded as the
greatest German poet. He was the “father
of German poetry,” at least in respect
to its form. His Aristarchus sive de
Contemptu Linguae Teutonicae (1617)
asserted the suitability of the German
language for poetry. His influential
Buch von der deutschen Poeterey, written
in 1624, established long-standing rules
for the “purity” of language, style,
verse, and rhyme. It insisted upon word
stress rather than syllable counting as
the basis of German verse and
recommended the alexandrine. The
scholarly, stilted, and courtly style
introduced by Opitz dominated German
poetry until the middle of the 18th
century. Opitz’s poems follow his own
rigorous rules and are mostly didactic
and descriptive—formal elaborations of
carefully considered themes.
In retrospect, Opitz’s activities as
an aesthetic educator and translator
have assumed much importance. He
translated from Heinsius, Grotius,
Seneca, and Sophocles; he partly
translated from the text by O. Rinuccini
the libretto of Dafne, the first opera
in German; he introduced the political
novel (John Barclay’s Argenis) into
Germany; and he edited (1638) the German
version of Sir Philip Sidney’s prose
romance Arcadia and the 11th-century
poem Annolied. Opitz’s Opera Poetica
appeared in 1646.
