e novelist and dramatist Karl Gutzkow, found
the name "Young Germany." Just as the "Storm and Stress" of 1770 to
1780, and the Romantic movement of the opening nineteenth century,
represented a spirit of sharp revolt against the then dominant
pseudo-classicism and rationalism, so "Young Germany" reacted
passionately against the moonlight sentimentality of the popular
romantic poets, as well as against the stupid political conservatism of
the time. The aim of the Young Germans was to bring literature down from
the clouds into vital contact with the immediate problems of the day.
Thus there was developed a body of literature strongly polemic in
purpose, quite hostile to the ideals of detachment and disinterested
worship of beauty that Goethe and Schiller in their classical period had
preached and practised. This literature took the form of fiction, drama,
and journalism, as well as of poetry. Indeed, the only important lyric
poet of the Young German group was HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856), who had
begun his career with the most intimate poetry of personal confession,
in which the simplicity of the folk-song and the nature-feeling of the
romanticist are strongly tinged with wit and cynicism. Heine's
impatience with German conditions led him to expatriate himself, and
from his retreat in Paris to aim venomous shafts of satire at his native
land, with its "three dozen masters" and its philistine conservative
nightcaps and dumplings. This brilliant poet, with his marvelous mastery
of German lyric tones, expressed a wide range of poetic inspiration; but
he loved particularly to conceive of himself as an apostle of liberty,
an outpost of the revolutionary army, and none so well as he could tip
the barb with biting sarcasm and satire. Heine's personality was full
of seemingly inconsistent traits. He was both fanciful and rational,
serious and flippant, tender and cynical, reverent and impious; and he
could be at once a patriot and an alien. He was, to use his own phrase,
an "unfrocked romanticist"--at once a brilliant representative of the
poetry of self-expression and personal caprice, and an exemplar and
prophet of a new ideal, the "holy alliance of poetry with the cause of
the nations."

The different attitudes of thoughtful men toward the influences of the
time were variously reflected in the work of three leading poets, all
older than Heine, who contributed largely to the lyric output of the
period. ADELBERT VON CHAMISSO (1781