"Du bist uns kaum entwichen, und schwermütig ziehen / Aus dumpfen Höhlen . . . Verdruß und Langeweile" (You have only just disappeared, and heavily rise / Frustration and boredom ... from musty caves). Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote these emphatic lines about Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariä after meeting him in Leipzig in 1767. Goethe implicitly refers to the kind of literature for which Zachariä was known and appreciated in his time: light, entertaining poems and mock-heroic epics in the Rococo style. Zachariä's works were successful, and some of them underwent many reprints and translations. Today he would be forgotten if it were not for his first work, the mock-heroic poem "Der Renommiste" (The Braggart, 1744), which made this genre extremely popular in mid-eighteenth-century Germany.

Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariä was born in Frankenhausen, Thuringia, the third child of Friedrich Sigismund Zachariä, the chamber secretary of the prince of...