NOVALIS (1774)

Pseudonym of FRIEDRICH LEOPOLD FREIHERR VON HARDENBERG.

Early Romantic poet whose works and theories influenced later Romantics in Germany, France and England.

He took his pen name from de Novali, that of his family, which belonged to the Protestant Lower Saxon nobility.

Novalis studied law at Jena (1790) and then at Leipzig where he formed a friendship with the future philosopher and Romantic Friedrich von Schlegel.

Novalis was appointed auditor to the government saltworks at Weissenfels aster completing his studies at Wittenberg in 1793.

His grief at the death in 1797 of his fiancée, Sophie von Kühn, was expressed in the beautiful Hymnen an die Nacht (1800, Hymns to the Night), six prose poems interspersed with verse that celebrate death as an entry into a higher life in the presence of God.

In the same year he went to study geology at the Freiberg School of Mining under Abraham Gottlob Werner whom he immortalized as the Meister in the fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (written 1798, The Novices of Sais) a novel of nature philosophy.

The next two years were very productive for Novalis.
He produced encyclopaedic studies, a draft of an Idealist philosophical system, and poetics works. He read at Jena (1799) before a circle of young Romantic poets his Geistliche Lieder (1799, Sacred Songs) the principal work by which his influence was extended. In 1800 he was appointed local magistrate in Thuringia where he contracted the tuberculosis of which he died.

The two collections of his works Blütenstaub (1798, Pollen) and Glauben und Leibe (1798, Faith and Life) are for the most part, fragments, they attempt to combine poetry, philosophy and science in an allegorical interpretation of the world.

His celebrated mythical romance Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802, Henry of Ofterdingen) reflects the ideas and tendencies of the older Romantic school and using the symbol of the blue flower for which the hero searches, describes the mission of the poet to transform the world into the poetry of fairy tale through the power of imagination.

Novalis essays Die Christedheit oder Europa (1799, Christendom or Europe) depicting the history of Christianity as a threefold process of unity, disintegration and new unity established the trend of the Romantic generation toward the Roman Catholic Church.