Christoph Martin Wieland
born Sept. 5, 1733, Oberholzheim,
near Biberach [Germany]
died Jan. 20, 1813, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar
poet and man of letters of the German
Rococo period whose work spans the major
trends of his age, from rationalism and
the Enlightenment to classicism and
pre-Romanticism.
Wieland was the son of a Pietist
parson, and his early writings from the
1750s were sanctimonious and strongly
devotional. During the 1760s, however,
he discovered another, more sensual
aspect of his nature and moved toward a
more worldly, rationalistic philosophy.
Although some of Wieland’s work of this
period includes erotic poetry, he began
to find the balance between sensuality
and rationalism that marked his mature
writing. His Geschichte des Agathon, 2
vol. (1766–67; History of Agathon),
which describes the process, is
considered the first Bildungsroman, or
novel of psychological development.
Between 1762 and 1766 Wieland
published the first German translations
of 22 of William Shakespeare’s plays,
which were to be influential models for
Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”)
dramatists. Wieland was professor of
philosophy at Erfurt (1769–72) and was
then appointed tutor to the Weimar
princes. He was not a successful teacher
but spent the rest of his life in or
near the court circle as an admired man
of letters. In 1773 he established Der
teutsche Merkur (“The German Mercury”),
which was a leading literary periodical
for 37 years. Late in life, he
considered himself a classicist and
devoted most of his time to translating
Greek and Roman authors. His allegorical
verse epic Oberon (1780) foreshadows
many aspects of Romanticism.
