biography
| name: |
Freiligrath, Ferdinand
|
pronunciation:
[friyligraht]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1810–76)
|
| biography:
| Poet and journalist, born in Detmold, WC Germany, one of the few overtly political writers of the time. Initially a merchant like his father, he turned to writing and also translated French and English writers. His first successful poems and ballads earned him a royal pension, but in 1844, which saw the publication of his collected political poems Ein Glaubensbekenntnis, he renounced this, having become a spokesman for the Liberals (as in his 1846 poems Ça ira!, inspired by meetings with Marx). In the following years he was forced on several occasions to flee the country, and was even briefly arrested in 1851 for alleged activities hostile to the state (Die Toten an die Lebenden, 1848). His writings are characterized by a passionately radical espousal of the abortive revolutionary movement of the first half-century known as the ‘Vormärz’. |
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