Matthias Claudius was one of the luminaries of the literary revival in Germany during the last third of the eighteenth century. He still occupies a permanent place in German literature as one of its most beloved poets; his position, however, rests on a mere handful of repeatedly anthologized pieces. Those pieces and the resultant stereotype of the author as a gentle singer of universal values such as family, nature, and religion are virtually all that survives the intellectual and sociopolitical upheavals at the end of the eighteenth century and the development of a Romantic, nationalistic literary canon in the nineteenth. While the real Claudius is only now returning to view, it is already clear that his thematic and formal range, his involvement with the issues of the times, and his debt to the Enlightenment were all greater than commonly acknowledged.

Claudius was born on 15 August 1740 in Reinfeld, near...