German poetry seems to have stagnated between 1685, when the last great baroque authors had died, and the emergence of the bourgeois Enlightenment's fresh ideological and artistic energies during the 1720s. Historians characterize the literary scene of the time as the domain chiefly of opportunistic rhymers who flattered the powerful and wealthy for pay and of epigones imitating the most trivial Italian and French models. This dreary ambience makes all the more vivid the phenomenon of Johann Christian Günther, that age's most gifted and audaciously dedicated poet and one of its most trenchant critics. Political, social, and cultural conditions, as well as his own difficult temperament, fatefully marked his life and works. Soon after his death, his contemporaries alternately condemned and celebrated Günther as a legendary German poète maudit (poet under a curse). Subsequent critics have often let moral considerations or psychological speculation...