I lived from 1802-1850.
I was from Hungary, and am in the European category.
LENAU, NIKOLAUS, the pseudonym of NIKOLAUS FRANZ NIEMBSCH VON STREHLENAU (1802—1850), Austrian poet, who was born at Csatâd near Temesvar in Hungary, on the 25th of August 1802. His father, a government official, died at Budapest in 1807, leaving his children to the care of an affectionate, but jealous and somewhat hysterical, mother, who in 1811 married again. In 1819 the boy went to the university of Vienna; he subsequently studied Hungarian law at Pressburg and then spent the best part of four years in qualifying himself in medicine. But he was unable to settle down to any profession.
Read full description by encyclopedia.org...
He had early begun to write verses; and the disposition to sentimental melancholy acquired from his mother, stimulated by love disappointments and by the prevailing fashion of the romantic school of poetry, settled into gloom after his mother’s death in 1829. Soon afterwards a legacy from his grandmother enabled him to devote himself wholly to poetry. His first published poems appeared in 1827, in J. G. Seidl’s Aurora. In 1831 he went to Stuttgart, where he published a volume of Gcdichte (1832) dedicated to the Swabian poet Gustav Schwab. Here he also made the acquaintance of Uhland, Justinus Kerner, Karl Mayerf and others; but his restless spirit longed for change, and he determined to seek for peace and freedom in America.
In October 1832 he landed at Baltimore and settled on a homestead in Ohio. But the reality of life in “ the primeval forest fell lamentably short of the ideal he had pictured; he disliked the Americans with their eternal “ English lisping of dollars “ (englischcs Talergelispel); and in 1833 he returned to Germany, where the appreciation of his first volume of poems revived his spirits. From now on he lived partly in Stuttgart and partly in Vienna.
In 1836 appeared his Faust, in which he laid bare his own soul to the world; in 1837, Savonarola, an epic in which freedom from political and intellectual tyranny is insisted upon as essential to Christianity. In 1838 appeared his Neuere Gedichte, which prove that Savonarola had been but the result of a passing exaltation. Of these new poems, some of the finest were inspired by his hopeless passion for Sophie von Lowenthal, the wife of a friend, whose acquaintance he had made in 1833 and who “understood him as no other.”
In 1842 appeared Die Albigenser, and in 1844 he began writing his Don Juan, a fragment of which was published after his death. Soon afterwards his never well-balanced mind began to show signs of aberration, and in October 1844 he was placed under restraint. He died in the asylum at Oberdobling near Vienna on the 22nd of August 1850.
Lenau’s fame rests mainly upon his shorter poems; even his epics are essentially lyric in quality. He is the greatest modern lyric poet of Austria, and the typical representative in German literature of that pessimistic Weltsclimerz which, beginning with Byron, reached its culmination in the poetry of Leopardi.
Links of interest include
http://www.dvhh.org/lenauheim/nikolaus-lenau/index.htm#NOW-THEN
My poetry
"Möchte wieder in die Gegend,
Wo ich einst so selig war,
43 lines
Sleepless night, the rushing rain,
While my heart with ceaseless pain
13 lines
Ich wandre fort ins ferne Land;
Noch einmal blickt' ich um , bewegt,
11 lines
In the west the sun departing
Leaves the weary day asleep,
49 lines
Eye of darkness, dim dominioned,
Stay, enchant me with thy might,
8 lines
In the sky the sun is failing,
And the weary day would sleep,
49 lines
Diese Rose pflück ich hier,
In der fremden Ferne;
15 lines
Three gipsy men I saw one day
Stretched out on the grass together,
33 lines
His sweet rose here oversea
I must gather sadly;
18 lines
Passing lovely was the night,
Silver clouds flew o'er us,
78 lines
Start a forum topic about this poet
