Friedrich von Hagedorn wrote humorous, didactic, sensuous lyric verse that introduced a secular and pragmatic strain into German baroque poetry. Breaking with many of the moral and aesthetic principles dominant at his time, he forged a path toward a more cosmopolitan attitude among eighteenth-century German intellectuals. Both the content and the form of his poems influenced writers in the period of Enlightenment and classicism, including Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. With Hagedorn, German literature closed the gap with England and France and moved to the new rococo style.

Hagedorn was the first child of the Danish state councillor Hans Statius von Hagedorn and Anna Maria von Hagedorn, née Schumacher. The parents had moved from Copenhagen to Hamburg, the mother's hometown, in 1697, and Hagedorn was born there on 23 April 1708. Three other children followed, but only one, Christian Ludwig, who would become a high-ranking bureaucrat...