Despite the depiction of incessant wanderings and frequent allusions to “die weite Welt” (the wide world) in the writings of Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, the poet himself actually had limited exposure to the world beyond the reaches of his native Upper Silesia in southeastern Germany. His journeys were primarily spiritual ones; even university days in Halle and Heidelberg, a student trip to Paris and Vienna, and eventual civil service posts in Breslau, Danzig, Berlin, and Königsberg did not take him to those distant, exotic, non-German-speaking lands, the Welschland, which his work often evokes. His birthplace, the Castle Lubowitz near Ratibor, remained at least the physical mecca to which he periodically returned until the deteriorating financial status of his aristocratic family forced the sale of all its properties in 1822.

By the age of ten, when Eichendorff first read the New Testament and was moved by the story of Christ’s Passion, he had already been introduced through the Polish and German folk songs and fairy tales of his native region to the second guiding force of his life, the power of poetry. The poet’s deep commitment to the Roman Catholic faith and his love for the music and beauty of words as well as his soon proven facility with them were to sustain him for his entire life, even when professional success as a governmental official was withheld from him and external pressures were overwhelming.

Eichendorff had ample discourse with gifted representatives of the Romantic movement, first in 1807, at the University of Heidelberg, where he heard the lectures of the philosopher Joseph von Görres and where he made the acquaintance of such leading literary figures as Clemens von Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Adam Müller, and then years later, in Berlin, with Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann, and in Vienna, with Friedrich von Schlegel. He was, however, to turn eventually from Romanticism and to take it to task figuratively in his poetry and literally in his expository writings. Any tendency to succumb completely to narcissistic Romantic musings on Eichendorff’s part was confined to his year in Heidelberg. His conscious awareness of the Dionysian dangers of Romanticism is evident in the larger body of his poetry and is particularly clear in the narrative Viel Lärmen um Nichts (1833; much ado about nothing).

After completion of his civil service examinations in Vienna in 1812 and his participation in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon in 1813 and 1815, Eichendorff married Aloysia von Larisch in 1815. They produced four children. The poet held various bureaucratic posts as governmental councillor in several North German cities until he took an early retirement in 1844 for reasons of ill health. From approximately 1816 to 1855, few details are available about Eichendorff’s personal life except for the indirect information revealed in his writing; the diaries he had kept regularly from the age of twelve were not continued into that period. His apparently ineffectual career gained him no special recognition; the sole honor bestowed upon him was the Medal for Science and Art by King Maximilian II of Bavaria.

From the poet’s retirement until his death thirteen years later at the home of his daughter Therese in Neisse, he resided for only brief periods of time in various East German cities and in Vienna. In the latter city, his acquaintances included the composer Robert Schumann and the writers Franz Grillparzer and Adalbert Stifter.

Although Eichendorff had a surprisingly wide circle of intellectual, artistic, and politically influential friends in the course of his life, he seems never to have been an overtly influential personal force among...