biography
pronunciation:
[koolman]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1651–89)
|
| biography:
| Poet and religious thinker, born in Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw, SW Poland). In 1673 he was converted in Leiden to the mysticism of Böhme. A self-proclaimed millenniarist, ‘son of the Son of God’, and missionary to Christians, Muslims, Jews, and pagans alike, after various abortive conversion attempts in East and West to his zealot ideals, including religious union and utopianism (as in De Monarchia Jesuelitica, 1682), he was sentenced to death in Moscow for heresy and burnt at the stake. His mystical poems, with their vivid imagery, left their traces not only on the late Baroque, but also on the movements of Pietism and Empfindsamkeit (‘Sensibility’). They include the collected poems Der Kühlpsalter (1684–6), taking their name from his self-styled punning sobriquets ‘Kühlheld’ or ‘Kühlmonarch’. |
|
|
