Heilige Poesie

The upheavals in European philosophy, religion and literature caused by the advent of the Age of Enlightenment did not leave the ancient and venerable tradition of Christian literature unaffected. One offshoot of the encounter was the idea of a form of 'sacred poetry' (F. G. Klopstock) in which Christian Revelation was to be represented in an entirely new way through the agency of the new 'enlightened' poetic diction. The study reconstructs the theory and the literary materializations of this idea in their historical context, with special reference to philosophical aesthetics, German pietism and rationalist poetics.