Literary Criticism (1400-1800)

Gryphius, Andreas | Hugh Powell (essay date 1970)

Hugh Powell (essay date 1970)

SOURCE: Powell, Hugh. “Observations on the Erudition of Andreas Gryphius.” Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 25, nos. 1 and 2 (1970): 115-25.

[In the following essay, Powell considers Gryphius's creative writings, orations, and explanatory notes, finding evidence of the author's strong classical background and store of renaissance learning.]

One of the best known memorial poems of seventeenth-century Germany is that which Lohenstein composed on the death of Andreas Gryphius.1 It consists of forty stanzas, each of six lines. The twenty-second stanza runs thus:

Ein Blatt aus seiner Schrifft wird weisen Lehrern weisen:
Daß / was er neues schrieb / doch auf die Alten zielt.
Auch Fremde nehmen wahr aus Schrifften seine Reisen /
Und daß sein Deutscher Mund mit Franckreichs Zunge spielt.
Daß Welschlands Schreibens=Art / die Römischen Geschichte /
Die Weißheit...

[The entire page is 4466 words long]

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