With the possible exception of a few twentieth-century writers, no German poet has enjoyed a larger contemporary audience than Barthold Heinrich Brockes, whose literary activity encompasses the late baroque and the early Enlightenment. In his own time he was known mainly for a Passion oratorio that was so popular that it was reprinted two dozen times in ten years; translated into Dutch, Swedish, and English; and set to music by at least ten composers, and for his translation of Giambattista Marini's epic portrayal of Herod's slaughter of the innocents. He is best known today, however, for his descriptions of nature. Indeed, the emphasis he placed on earthly beauty in nine volumes of poems, some of which went through five or more editions, has prompted some scholars to consider him the forerunner of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Although considered dry and tendentious by later generations who measure it against...