Martin Opitz was the major German representative of late Renaissance poetry in northern Europe. He ushered in a new era in German literature, the baroque, with his programmatic Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (Book of German Poetry, 1624), which set new standards for poetry fashioned after elegant Neo-Latin, French, Italian, and Dutch Renaissance models while breaking with the popular, often vulgar literary production and irregular versification of his German predecessors. With the example of his own poetry he propagated a national, humanistic literary program in his own country, which had adopted his views by the time of his premature death in 1639-making him, in the eyes of later generations, the "father of German literature." His life and literary production were deeply affected by the religious wars of the seventeenth century and by the rising power of absolutist princes; thus, his biography is as much influenced by politics as it...