Living most of his life in Nuremberg, a leading center of German culture and book production in the seventeenth century, Sigmund von Birken was at the heart of literary activity in the city for three decades. His influence, however, reached far beyond the city, for he maintained an extensive network of literary contacts that included nobles as well as commoners. More through his untiring managerial and editorial efforts and his facility in composing poetry virtually on demand than through any great gift of poetic inspiration, he achieved a position of high esteem among his contemporaries. Birken was a true poet of his age; but at the same time he was unique, in that he was one of the first German poets before Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to make his living by his pen alone. At the time of his death he was widely recognized as a master of German...