Johann Peter Uz is best known in German literary history for his translation of Anacreon with Johann Nikolaus Götz and his original endeavors in the style associated with the Greek poet. His philosophical and religious poetry has on the whole been unduly neglected, for it is here that he did much of his most successful and historically most significant work; his achievement in reflective poetry earned him a prominent position in a tradition which culminated in the Ideenlyrik (philosophical poetry) of Friedrich Schiller.

Uz was born on 3 October 1720 in Ansbach, southwest of Nuremberg in northern Bavaria. The son of a moderately wealthy goldsmith, he studied law from 1739 to 1743 at the University of Halle, where he heard lectures in philosophy by three of the most influential figures of the German Enlightenment--Georg Friedrich Meir, Alexander Baumgarten, and Christian Wolff. His later work clearly attests to his familiarity with...