Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg is known in the history of German letters as the younger and more talented and prolific of the Stolberg brothers who arrived on the literary scene with the dynamic generation of the 1770s. While his work includes a novel and several plays, only a few of his poems and shorter essays survived the vicissitudes of nineteenth-century canonization. These works, however, disclose an almost paradigmatic figure of German Sentimentalism and suggest the need for an expanded and intensified resumption of the Stolberg scholarship that occurred in the 1960s.

Born on 7 November 1750 in Bramstedt, a small town in present-day Schleswig-Holstein, Stolberg was formatively influenced by both his introspective and humane father, Christian Günther zu Stolberg, who helped abolish serfdom in north Germany and Denmark, and his vivacious and imaginative mother, Friederike Christiane, who was inclined toward Pietism. He spent a happy childhood and...