BURGER, GOTTFRIED AUGUST

born Dec. 31, 1747, Molmerswende bei Halberstadt, Brandenburg died June 8, 1794, Gttingen, Hanover one of the founders of German Romantic ballad literature whose style reflects the renewed interest in folk song (Volkspoesie) in Europe during the late 1700s. Brger was educated in theology at the University of Halle and in law at the University of Gttingen. It was in Gttingen that he first came into contact with a group of Sturm und Drang poets known as the Gttinger Hain, who drew inspiration from folk ballads. In 1773 Brger published the bizarre ballad Lenore, a spectral romance in which a ghostly rider, posing as Lenore's dead lover, carries her away on a macabre night ride through an eerie landscape illuminated by flashes of lightning. It culminates in a revelation of the rider as Death himselfa skeleton with scythe and hourglass. The poem's use of refrain and its simple and nave language, as well as its sensational theme, had a profound effect upon the subsequent development of Romanticism throughout Europe. Brger's unbalanced temperament and largely impoverished circumstances prevented him from ever achieving lasting happiness. In 1774 he married Dorette Leonhard but soon fell passionately in love with her sister, the Molly of his sonnets. His wife's death, in 1784, freed him to marry Molly, but she died soon afterward, in childbirth. In 1789 he was appointed extraordinary professor at Gttingen, though without a stipend, leaving him in poverty for the remainder of his life. A third marriage, in 1790, was a disaster and was dissolved in 1792. In addition to a number of Petrarchan sonnets, which considerably influenced later German poets, Brger also did translations from the English, rendering an influential collection of English and Scottish traditional ballads, Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, into German.