Initially celebrated and then quickly forgotten, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock appeared on the arid scene of the mid eighteenth century as the great innovator of what was to become the modern literary tradition. His early odes and the first three cantos of his epic Der Messias (1748-1773; translated in part as The Messiah, 1763) were greeted with a burst of enthusiasm by contemporaries, and Klopstock was recognized as the first major German writer since Martin Luther. Poets of the "Göttinger Hain Bund" (Göttingen Grove League) as well as those of the Sturm und Drang, including the young Johann Wolfgang Goethe, were inspired by Klopstock, who also received favorable attention from the greatest critics of the time, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Gottfried Herder. Klopstock was, however, soon left behind by the very developments he had inaugurated, and by the last quarter of the century times had...