Count August von Platen-Hallermund (1796-1835) is characterized by the eternal Romantic homelessness; at every turn of his career this impresses one.  Of ancient noble Franconian stock, he felt himself a foreigner in Bavaria which had acquired Franconia in the Napoleonic period.  In his early life in the military academy at Munich he was never thoroughly at home, for his was not a military spirit and he was unable to follow his literary tastes.  When finally he was enabled to study at Wuerzburg and Erlangen, even the friendship of Schelling could not compensate for the late beginning of a university career which was filled with the study of modern European and Oriental languages but which had the bitterest personal disappointments.  Even in Italy, the land of every German poet’s dreams, Platen never felt himself at home, and the pictures of him from his Italian life are of a tragic, lonesome figure.  The discord between body and soul, that homelessness in one’s own physical body which characterized Hoffmann and made him seem diabolical to so many, is also to be noted in Platen.  Carried over to the moral world, it accounts for his ardent cultivation of friendship rather than love, and frees him from the bitter accusations of Heine, whose attack in The Baths of Lucca is one of the most scurrilous and venomous pasquils in all literary history.  Finally, in the esthetic world, Platen seems largely un-German.  His esthetics were of the Classical and Renaissance times; in an age of the breaking down of conventions and of literary revolutions, Platen held himself rigidly aristocratic; he clung to a canon of beauty in an age which was giving birth to realism.

Platen’s poetry falls into two periods—­the early German tentative period and the later or foreign period, the poems of which were mostly written in Italy and in imitation of, or adapted from, foreign metres.  Platen is always represented as a master of form, and, since Jacob Grimm’s characterization of him, has been accused of “marble coldness.”  That Platen handled difficult metres with virtuosity is not to be laid against him; it is to the advantage of German verse that such poems as his ghasels made indigenous, in part, the feeling for mere beauty in verse.  German poets have too often gone the road of mere formlessness.  Platen cultivated style, polished and revised his lines with as great care as did his arch-enemy Heine, and it is only a confession of lack of ear to refuse him the name of poet.  No one who reads his Polish Songs can help feeling that they are the products of fire and inspiration.

It must be confessed, however, that there is in Platen a remarkable lack of inner experience.  He went through life without ever having been shaken to the depths of his nature and was, unfortunately, not of so Olympian a calmness that, like Goethe, he could present the world in plastic repose and sublimity.  With all his refinement and fervor he has left but few poems of lasting interest, and of these The Grave in the Busento is perhaps the best.