Voss, Johann Heinrich

Voss, Johann Heinrich 

Born Feb. 20, 1751, in Sommersdorf, Mecklenburg; died Mar. 29, 1826, in Heidelberg. German poet and translator.

Voss studied at the University of Göttingen from 1772 to 1776 and became a professor at the University of Heidelberg in 1805. He was one of the founders of the Grove Association (also known as the Göttingen Grove), a group that was part of the Sturm und Drang movement. Voss composed idylls that sharply criticized feudal survivals in Germany; these idylls, such as Luise (1783–84; rev. ed. 1795) often depicted a “village Utopia.” In such pamphlets as How Did Fritz Stolberg Become a Slave? (1819), Voss criticized the German romantics and the intensification of political and clerical reactionism from the standpoint of the Enlightenment. Voss’ translations of Homer’s Odyssey (1781) and Iliad (1793) had great cultural significance.

WORKS

Werke in einem Band. Berlin, 1966.
In Russian translation:
Inostrannye poety: Gotfrid Biurger i Iogann Foss s prilozheniem ikh stikhotvorenii. Moscow, 1901.

REFERENCES

Istoriia nemetskoi literatury, vol. 2. Moscow, 1963.
Neustroev, V. P. ‘“Gettingenskii soiuz’: Voss i Biurger.” In his Nemetskaia literatura epokhi Prosveshcheniia. Moscow, 1958.

A. A. GUGNIN