Hymns to the Night by Novalis

Hymns to the Night by Novalis

Novalis's Hymns to the Night is not only one of the seminal documents of German Romanticism as well as of modern poetry and poetic experimentation, it is also one of the landmarks of Sophiology. The poem, which shifts from poetic forms to prose, from biography to the realm of the spirit, and from the historical to the transcendent, discloses to the reader a world ever new, as the poet scales the heights of poetic inspiration and touches divinity.

Mabel Cotterell is sensitive both to Novalis's poetics and to his mysticism, the ideal translator of his work. She captures the exquisite artistry and startling freshness of Novalis's words in language filled with grace and light.

Novalis was born on Schloß Oberwiederstett in the year 1772 as Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. Hardenberg is not hired into the state service after completing his legal studies, as expected, and begins a second education at the Bergakademie in Freiberg in 1797. In 1799, he starts working in the Salinenverwaltung in Weißenfels. His intense engagement with the philosophy and literature of his time, as well as his friendships with Schiller, Jean Paul, and Goethe, piques his interest in poetry and serves as the springboard for his literary-philosophical output. The first Fragments with the title Blüthenstaub appear in the Frühromantiker Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel's Zeitschrift Athenaeum in 1798, under the name Novalis for the first time.

Novalis' increasing clout leads him to devote more time to religion: his most popular work is The Geistlichen Lieder, which was first published in the Musenalmanach in the year 1802. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, his unfinished Roman, is considered a key work in the field of early Romanticism. The attempt to compile an Enzyklopädie of all sciences and arts into a single body of knowledge fails miserably. The collection represents a pinnacle of earlyromantic synthesestreben in the realm of knowledge.

Novalis was born in the year 1801 in Weißenfels, near the Schwindsucht.