The generation of poets that was emerging at about the time of the deaths of Martin Opitz and Paul Fleming was able to exploit the results of the Opitzian verse reform and to write in German with a confidence that had been lacking a couple of decades earlier. David Schirmer was one of those poets whose writings span the central years of the seventeenth century. His love poetry, moral poetry, and occasional verse for the Saxon court demonstrate an elegance and fluency that he seems to have possessed from an early age. He is capable of handling the formality of the poem in alexandrines; although his sonnet cycle for "Marnia" is well known, and although he expressed himself in other short forms, such as the madrigal and the epigram, he was most prolific in the genre of the song.

Schirmer was born on 29 May 1623 in the village of...